PIV analysis of skin friction and coherent structures in turbulent drag reduction regimes

In the present work, planar and tomographic PIV are used to investigate how the organisation of wall turbulence is altered when actuators are operated with the objective of reducing the skin friction drag. When the wall is mechanically oscillated in the spanwise direction, high-resolution planar PIV enable the direct measurement of wall shear and a 15% reduction of skin friction is observed. The use of tomographic PIV enables access to the three dimensional organisation of low- and high-speed streaks, along with ejection events and associated hairpin vortices. These observations help forming a conceptual model of the salient drag reduction mechanism, whereby hairpin auto-generation is inhibited through a tilting action at the tail of low-speed streaks.
The second part of the study documents an effort to surrogate the mechanical oscillation by means of a densely distributed array of AC-DBD plasma actuators. The latter are first characterised in quiescent flow, where the induced velocity distribution is obtained and compared to the solution of the classical second Stokes problem that models the mechanical oscillation. The induced peak of spanwise velocity is found to surpass the velocity of the oscillating wall. However, the wall jet height develops further away from the wall. More importantly, the spatially inhomogeneous distribution of the unsteady body force produces an unwanted lattice of starting streamwise vortices. The latter are deemed to be detrimental for the purpose of drag reduction, compared to the orderly and homogeneous sideways motion induced by mechanical wall motion. The application of the AC-DBD actuator currently leads to a pronounced momentum deficit in the logarithmic region and increases skin friction. Finally, further research directions are anticipated, that potentially circumvent the formation of streamwise vortices by means of AC-DBD actuators operating in steady regime.