Spatial structure in the viscous sublayer

Abstract

An experimental investigation was performed to study the spatial coherence of structures in the sublayer of a turbulent boundary layer observed previously by flow visualization. The present work verifies these observations in an Eulerian reference frame and develops a statistical description of the phenomenon. The technique involves simultaneous digital sampling of an array of constant temperature hot-wire anemometers arranged to extract information about a spanwise variation in flow quantities. The quantitative description agrees with dimensionless measures of the structure scales previously published.