Experimental study on turbulent bound- ary-layer flows with wall transpiration

Wall transpiration, in the form of wall-normal suction or blowing through a permeable wall, is a relatively simple and effective technique to control the behaviour of a boundary layer. For its potential applications for laminar-turbulent transition and separation delay (suction) or for turbulent drag reduction and thermal protection (blowing), wall transpiration has over the past decades been the topic of a significant amount of studies. However, as far as the turbulent regime is concerned, fundamental understanding of the phenomena occurring in the boundary layer in presence of wall transpiration is limited and considerable disagreements persist even on the description of basic quantities, such as the mean streamwise velocity, for the rather simplified case of flat-plate boundary-layer flows without pressure gradients. In order to provide new experimental data on suction and blowing boundary layers, an experimental apparatus was designed and brought into operation. The perforated region spans the whole 1.2 m of the test-section width and with its streamwise extent of 6.5 m is significantly longer than previous studies, allowing for a better investigation of the spatial development of the boundary layer. The quality of the experimental setup and measurement procedures was verified with extensive testing, including benchmarking against previous results on a canonical zero-pressure-gradient turbulent boundary layer (ZPG TBL) and on a laminar asymptotic suction boundary layer. The present experimental results on ZPG turbulent suction boundary layers show that it is possible to experimentally realize a turbulent asymptotic suction boundary layer (TASBL) where the boundary layer mean-velocity profile becomes independent of the streamwise location, so that the suction rate constitutes the only control parameter. TASBLs show a mean-velocity profile with a large logarithmic region and without the existence of a clear wake region. If outer scaling is adopted, using the free-stream velocity and the boundary layer thickness (δ99) as characteristic velocity and length scale respectively, the logarithmic region is described by a slope Ao = 0.064 and an intercept Bo = 0.994, independently from the suction rate (Γ). Relaminarization of an initially turbulent boundary layer is observed for Γ > 3.70× 10−3. Wall suction is responsible for a strong damping of the velocity fluctuations, with a decrease of the near-wall peak of the velocity-variance profile ranging from 50% to 65% when compared to a canonical ZPG TBL at comparable Reτ . This decrease in the turbulent activity appears to be explained by an increased stability of the near-wall streaks.