Wind-tunnel skin-friction measurements with thin-oil-film interferometry have been taken on an aluminum sample to investigate the effects of wall temperature on the accuracy of the technique. The sample has been flush-mounted onto a flat plate with an electric heater at its bottom and mirror-smooth temperature-sensitive paint sprayed on its top. The heater has varied the sample temperature from ambient to 328 K, and the paint has permitted wall temperature measurements on the same area of the skin-friction measurements and during the same test. The measured wall temperatures have been used to calculate the correct oil viscosities, and these viscosities and the constant nominal viscosity at 298 K have been used to calculate two different sets of skin-friction coefficients. These sets have been compared to each other and with theoretical values. This comparison shows that the effects of wall temperature on the accuracy of skin-friction measurements are sensible, and more so as wall temperature differs from 298 K. Nonetheless, they are effectively neutralized by the use of wall temperature measurements in combination with the correct oil viscosity–temperature law. In this regard, the special temperature-sensitive paint developed for this study shows advantages with respect to more traditional wall temperature measurement techniques.

A unique approach to evaluate the reduction of skin friction drag by riblets was applied to boundary layer profiles measured in wind tunnel experiments. The proposed approach emphasized the turbulent scales based on hot-wire anemometry data obtained at a sampling frequency of 20 kHz in the turbulent boundary layer to evaluate the skin friction drag reduction. Three-dimensional riblet surfaces were fabricated using aviation paint and were applied to a flat-plate model surface. The turbulent statistics, such as the turbulent scales and intensities, in the boundary layer were identified based on the freestream velocity data obtained from the hot-wire anemometry. Those turbulent statistics obtained for the riblet surface were compared to those obtained for a smooth flat plate without riblets. Results indicated that the riblet surface increased the integral scales and decreased the turbulence intensity, which indicated that the turbulent structure became favorable for reducing skin friction drag. The proposed method showed that the current three-dimensional riblet surface reduced skin friction drag by about 2.8% at a chord length of 67% downstream of the model’s leading edge and at a freestream velocity of 41.7 m/s (Mach 0.12). This result is consistent with that obtained by the momentum integration method based on the pitot-rake measurement, which provided a reference dataset of the boundary layer profile.

This paper describes a technique for quantitatively measuring the time-averaged skin friction distribution on a wind tunnel test model. The technique is a hybrid oil film approach that is based on the combination of the qualitative skin friction distribution obtained from luminescent oil film and the quantitative local skin friction measurements obtained from oil film interferometry in another blowing of the same flow condition. To demonstrate its validity, the proposed method was applied to the flow field around a vortex generator on a flat plate, and successfully measured the quantitative skin friction distribution.

No abstract

No abstract