An Experimental Investigation of Wall Pressure Fluctuations Beneath Non- Equilibrium Turbulent Flows

Abstract

Wall pressure fluctuations beneath a non-equilibrium turbulent boundary layer were studied experimentally. The objective of the investigation was to better understand the process by which turbulent boundary layers flows produce wall pressure fluctuations. The approach was to study the statistics of both the wall pressure field and velocity field for a non-equilibrium turbulent boundary layers, produced by passing a flow over a backward-facing step, and then to identify turbulent structures in the flow that contribute to the source terms of the wall pressure field. Detailed velocity and wall pressure measurements were also obtained for an equilibrium flow to provide a basis of comparison for the perturbed flow results. The wall pressure statistics for the perturbed flow are characterized by the presence of the disturbance layers variables. Hence, the source of the low frequency excess in the wall pressure fluctuations is the disturbance layer. The high frequency wall pressures were found to scale on inner variables, and as such, recovered to an equilibrium flow condition quite rapidly. This places the perturbed source of high frequency wall pressures in the inner layer of the boundary layer.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 01, 1986
Accession Number
ADA171508

Entities

People

  • Theodore M. Farabee

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Engineered Resilient Systems
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Sensors

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Birds
  • Boundary Layer
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Computational Science
  • Convection
  • Databases
  • Flow Visualization
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Fluid Mechanics
  • Measurement
  • Mechanics
  • Physics Laboratories
  • Pressure Distribution
  • Pressure Measurement
  • Stratified Fluids
  • Three Dimensional
  • Two Dimensional

Fields of Study

  • Physics

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  • Fluid Mechanics and Fluid Dynamics.