Study of Unsteady Surface Flowfields on and Around Turrets with Different Protrusions

Abstract

Wind-tunnel experiments were conducted to measure the unsteady surface pressure field on and around a hemisphere-on-cylinder turret of varying protrusion in subsonic flow. These measurements were obtained using fast-response pressure-sensitive paint coupled with pressure transducers. The surface pressure field data resulting from Mach 0.5 flow () over a partially submerged hemisphere, a hemisphere, and a hemisphere on a cylinder were analyzed using proper orthogonal decomposition modal analysis, as well as a variant of this approach referred to as joint proper orthogonal decomposition. The results showed that decreased turret protrusion into the freestream flow reduced the prevalence of antisymmetric surface pressure field fluctuations caused by antisymmetrical vortex shedding. The frequency associated with this fluctuation was found to be around . When a partial hemispherical turret geometry was used, it was shown that the antisymmetric mode was greatly suppressed; and the wake was dominated by a symmetric mode with a broadband spectral peak at a higher frequency of . This suggests that there is a “mode switching” as the protrusion is changed from the hemisphere to the partial hemisphere configuration. An optical flow approach was used to find the convective velocity field in the wake, from which topological flow features could be identified. The size of the wake separation region was found to grow smaller with the decreased protrusion while keeping a similar shape.