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Experimental investigation of extreme skin friction events in polymer drag-reduced turbulent boundary layers

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Abstract

An experimental investigation is conducted using planar and tomographic particle image velocimetry (PIV) measurements in the near-wall region of drag-reduced zero-pressure-gradient turbulent boundary layers. Drag reductions of approximately 20 and \(30\%\) were achieved using injection of two different concentrations of polymer solutions into the boundary layer via a two-dimensional inclined slot. The PIV measurements are utilized for evaluating the effect of the polymers on the near-wall flow fields associated with extreme skin-friction events, which are identified by proxy of fluctuating streamwise velocity at the edge of the viscous sublayer. A binary scale decomposition technique is employed to investigate the dampening of small-scale motions in drag-reduced flows using the three-dimensional measurements. The scale decomposed results highlight a range of small-scale structures (\(< \sim \delta /2\)) with negligible contribution to the Reynolds shear stresses (RSS) in the polymer-injected flows, while the effect of the polymer on the large-scale motions (\(>\sim \delta /2\)) remains negligible. Furthermore, conditional averaging of the near-wall flow field elucidates the topology within the buffer and lower-log regions associated with extreme large-scale low and high wall-shear stress events. The results highlight the effect of polymer injection on the phase differences between the extreme wall-shear stress events and the RSS producing large-scale coherent structures.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) for funding of this work.

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  1. Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

    Y. Shah & S. Yarusevych

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

    S. Ghaemi

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Correspondence to S. Yarusevych.

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Shah, Y., Ghaemi, S. & Yarusevych, S. Experimental investigation of extreme skin friction events in polymer drag-reduced turbulent boundary layers. Exp Fluids 63, 27 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00348-021-03374-6

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