Effects of surface shapes on properties of turbulent/non-turbulent interface in turbulent boundary layers

Abstract

The effects of directional riblets surfaces on the turbulent/non-turbulent (T/NT) interface in turbulent boundary layers are experimentally investigated using two-dimensional time-resolved particle image velocimetry (PIV). The velocity field of streamwise—wall-normal plane for the smooth surface, converging and diverging riblets surfaces are measured. The interface is detected using the criterion of local kinetic energy. The statistical properties of interface height and conditional averaged velocity for different surfaces are analyzed. It is shown that, the converging and diverging riblets surfaces have little effect on the fractal dimension of the T/NT interface, but they cause the intermittency profile deviate from error function and the probability distribution of interface height deviate from Gaussian function. To be specific, the distribution of interface height for the converging riblets surface shows a positive skewness while it shows a negative skewness for the diverging riblets surface. Moreover, the conditional averaged streamwise velocity and spanwise vorticity across the interface are analyzed, and it is found that their self-similarities are preserved for different surfaces when normalized with respective friction velocity. The correlation analysis reveals that near-wall streamwise velocity fluctuation and interface height show a negative correlation.