Flying-hot-wire study of two-dimensional turbulent separation of an NACA 4412 airfoil at maximum lift

Abstract

Hot-wire measurements have been made in the boundary layer, the separated region, and the near wake for flow past an NACA 4412 airfoil at maximum lift. The Reynolds number based on chord was about 1,500,000. Special care was taken to achieve a two-dimensional mean flow. The main instrumentation was a flying hot wire; that is, a hot-wire probe mounted on the end of a rotating arm. The probe velocity was sufficiently high to avoid the usual rectification problem by keeping the relative flow direction always within a range of ±30 degrees to the probe axis. A digital computer was used to control synchronized sampling and storage of hot-wire data at closely spaced points along the probe arc. Data were obtained at several thousand locations in the flow field. These data include intermittency, two components of mean velocity, and mean values for three double, four triple, and five quadruple products of two velocity fluctuations. No information was obtained about the third (spanwise) velocity component. The data are available on punched cards in raw form and also in processed form, after use of smoothing and interpolation routines to obtain values on a fine rectangular mesh aligned with the airfoil chord. The data are displayed as contour plots of the fifteen variables.