Microstructured Surfaces for Drag Reduction Purposes: Experiments and Simulations on Rectangular 2D Riblets

Abstract

AbstractIt is well established that properly structured surface exhibits a lower friction drag, when exposed to a turbulent boundary layer, than a smooth surface under the same flow conditions. The observed drag decrease is usually attributed to an increased thickness of the viscous sublayer. In this work we examine the friction drag reducing mechanism. Two parallel approaches towards achieving this goal are presented. Photolithography was used to manufacture rectangular riblets in the 10∝m range on a standard 4” silicon wafer. A special compact plane channel system was designed and used for measurements of the frictional drag on structured surfaces in the turbulent flow covering a wide Reynolds number range. Navier-Stokes equation, for the examined drag reducing geometry, was solved in the laminar regime with appropriate boundary conditions. The resulting velocity field was used to extract the protrusion heights difference for streamwise and spanwise flows over the structured surface. The latter was then related to the experimentally measured drag reduction slope. We show that in case of a rectangular riblet, with a size of the order of one wall unit, the observed drag reduction can be accounted for within the above model.