Determination of Wall Friction Velocity of the Turbulent Boundary Layer by Two-Parameter Nonlinear Curve Fitting

Abstract

Hot-wire anemometer is a fundamental tool for flow field measurement, and has been widely adopted in research of turbulent flow. A turbulent boundary layer was generated by a trip wire and a piece of sandpaper in the low-speed wind tunnel, and the time-averaged velocity profiles at three different streamwise stations in the boundary layer were measured with IFA-300 constant temperature anemometer. Targeting the dimensionless velocity profile model White Law of the turbulent boundary layer, a nonlinear curve fitting MATLAB program for two parameters, which were theoretical original point of wall coordinate y0 and wall friction velocity uτ, was developed. Based on the measured time-averaged velocity profiles, the program was adopted to determine y0 and uτ of the three streamwise stations. It is found that the initial search domain and search step size of y0 and uτ have no effect on the fitting results if the physical solutions are included in the domain. It is also found that the selected fitting velocities data are closely related to the results. The value of the friction velocity with high precision will be obtained by this nonlinear curve fitting method if the highest fitting velocity data point dose not fall into the wake region. The method given in this paper is simple in programming and reliable in fitting results, and it is of practical to obtain the wall friction velocity of the turbulent boundary layer.