Influence of pressure gradient on streamwise skewness factor in turbulent boundary layer

Abstract

The paper shows an effect of favourable and adverse pressure gradients on turbulent boundary layer. The skewness factor of streamwise velocity component was chosen as a measure of the pressure gradient impact. It appears that skewness factor is an indicator of convection velocity of coherent structures, which is not always equal to the average flow velocity. The analysis has been performed based upon velocity profiles measured with hot-wire technique in turbulent boundary layer with pressure gradient corresponding to turbomachinery conditions. The results show that the skewness factor decreases in the flow region subjected to FPG and increases in the APG conditions. The changes of convection velocity and skewness factor are caused by influence of large-scale motion through the mechanism called amplitude modulation. The large-scale motion is less active in FPG and more active in APG, therefore in FPG the production of vortices is random (there are no high and low speed regions), while in the APG the large-scale motion drives the production of vortices. Namely, the vortices appear only in the high-speed regions, therefore have convection velocity higher than local mean velocity. The convection velocity affects directly the turbulent sweep and ejection events. The more flow is dominated by large-scale motion the higher values takes both the convection velocity of small-scale structures and sweep events induced by them.