YIP-Low-Order Representations of Irregular Surface Roughness and Their Impact on Wall Turbulence

Abstract

This effort explored the impact of topographical scales present within irregular surface roughness on a turbulent boundary layer. Low-order representations of a surface replicated from a turbine blade damaged by deposition of foreign materials were generated using singular value decomposition to decompose the complex topography into a set of basis functions of decreasing importance to the original ("full") surface. The low-order surface models were then formed by truncating the basis functions at the first 5 and 16 modes (containing 71 % and 95% of the full surface content, respectively), so that only the largest-scale topographical features were included. Physical replications of these surfaces were rapid prototyped and particle-image velocimetry was used to measure the flow over these surfaces in the streamwise-wall-normal plane and in a streamwise-spanwise plane deep within the roughness sublayer. A 16-mode model of the full surface faithfully reproduced most of the characteristics of flow over the full surface for both developing and developed flow conditions. However, both models failed to reproduce important details of the Reynolds-shear-stress-producing events within the roughness sublayer. The final report details these observations.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 28, 2010
Accession Number
ADA528559

Entities

People

  • Kenneth T Christensen
  • Ricardo Mejia-Alvarez

Organizations

  • University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Boundaries
  • Boundary Layer
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Flow
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Layers
  • Measurement
  • Mechanical Properties
  • Mechanics
  • Physics Laboratories
  • Roughness
  • Shear Stresses
  • Surface Properties
  • Surface Roughness
  • Turbine Blades
  • Turbulence
  • Turbulent Boundary Layer

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Atmospheric Science / Meteorology, specifically Wind Wave Turbulence.
  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Fluid Mechanics and Fluid Dynamics.