Wake instabilities of a blunt trailing edge profiled body at intermediate Reynolds numbers

Abstract

Experiments have been conducted to identify and characterize the instabilities in the wake of a blunt trailing edge profiled body, comprised of an elliptical leading edge and a rectangular trailing edge, for a broad range of Reynolds numbers ( $$2{,}000\le Re(d)\le 50{,}000$$ based on the thickness of the body). These experiments, which include measurements of the wake velocity field using hot-wire anemometry and particle image velocimetry, complement previous studies of the wake flow for the same geometry at lower and higher Reynolds numbers. The spatial characteristics of the primary wake instability (the von Karman vortex street) are found to have relatively little variation in the range of Reynolds numbers investigated, in spite of the transition of the boundary layer upstream of the trailing edge from a laminar to a turbulent state. The dominant secondary instability, identified based on the structure of velocity and vorticity fields in the wake extracted using proper orthogonal decomposition, is found to have features similar to the ones described numerically and experimentally by Ryan et al. (J Fluid Mech 538:1–29, 2005), and Naghib-Lahouti et al. (Exp Fluids 52:1547–1566, 2012) at lower Reynolds numbers. The findings suggest that the spatial characteristics of the dominant primary and secondary wake flow instabilities have little dependence on the state of the flow upstream of the separation points, in spite of the distinct change in the normalized vortex shedding frequency upon the transition of the boundary layer.