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A novel experimental facility to impose unsteady pressure gradients on turbulent boundary layers

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Abstract

The design and characterization of a new removable wind tunnel installation to impose unsteady pressure gradients (PGs) on flat plate turbulent boundary layers (TBLs) are presented. An electropneumatic actuation mechanism was used to rapidly deform a flat ceiling section into an inverted convex bump, producing a temporally strengthening favorable and adverse PG in spatial sequence. The design allowed the vertical extent of deformation and the speed of deformation of the ceiling to be independently varied in a controlled manner to access a series of spatial and temporal strengths of PGs. High-frequency pressure measurements were carried out to characterize the spatio-temporal pressure distributions in the test area for 18 test cases. The resulting range of PGs is presented in terms of non-dimensional parameters relevant to PG TBLs: the acceleration parameter (K), which varied in the range \([3, -2.5] \times 10^{-6}\), the Clauser PG parameter (\(\beta\)), in the range \(\pm 7\), and the non-dimensional gradient of pressure coefficient \(\left(\frac{dCp}{d(x/L)}\right)\), in the range \(\pm 2.6\). The temporal rates of change of PGs are presented in terms of the reduced frequency (k) and are in the range [0.19, 2.75]. The current and future potential for using this facility to impose a wide range of steady and unsteady PGs in a wind tunnel to enable fundamental studies of various engineering flows of interest are discussed.

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Acknowledgements

The support of the Grainger College of Engineering and the Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is gratefully acknowledged. We also thank the Office of Naval Research for support through Grant #N00014-21-1-2648.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Aerospace Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, 61820, USA

    Aadhy Parthasarathy & Theresa Saxton-Fox

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  1. Aadhy Parthasarathy
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  2. Theresa Saxton-Fox
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Contributions

Both authors contributed to the conception of the experimental design and the approach to its characterization. The detailed experimental design, assembly, and characterization was performed by AP. The data collection and analysis were performed by AP. The first draft of the manuscript was written by AP. Both authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript. Project supervision and funding acquisition were performed by TS-F.

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Correspondence to Aadhy Parthasarathy.

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The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interest to disclose. The authors have no competing interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this article. The authors have no financial or proprietary interests in any material discussed in this article.

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Parthasarathy, A., Saxton-Fox, T. A novel experimental facility to impose unsteady pressure gradients on turbulent boundary layers. Exp Fluids 63, 107 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00348-022-03456-z

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