Wall-pressure fluctuations beneath turbulent boundary layers on a flat plate and a cylinder

Abstract

Measurements of the turbulent pressure field on the outer surface of a 3 in. diameter cylinder aligned with the flow were made at a point approximately 24 ft. downstream of the origin of the turbulent boundary layer in an air stream of 145 ft./sec. The boundary-layer thickness was 2·78 in. and the Reynolds number based on momentum thickness was 2·62 × 104. The wall-pressure measurements were made with pressure transducers constructed from 0·06 in. diameter lead–zirconate–titanate disks mounted flush with the wall. The measurements including root-mean-square, power spectrum, and correlations of the wall pressure are compared with the existing experimental results for the turbulent pressure field beneath a plane boundary layer. The streamwise convection speed deduced from longitudinal space-time correlation measurements was almost identical to that obtained in the plane boundary layer. The rate of decay of the maxima of the space-time correlation of the pressure produced by the convected eddies was double that in a plane boundary layer. The longitudinal and transverse scales of the pressure correlation were approximately equal (in a plane boundary layer the transverse scale is larger than longitudinal scale) and were one-half or less than the longitudinal scale in the plane boundary layer. It is concluded that the effect of the transverse curvature of the wall is an overall reduction in size of pressure-producing eddies. The reduction in transverse scale of the larger eddies is greater than that of the smaller eddies. In general, the smaller eddies decay more rapidly and produce greater spectral densities at high frequencies owing to the unchanged convection speed.