No abstract

The wall shear stress distribution on an aerodynamically loaded component is of both practical and fundamental importance. Significant examples are the improvement of the performance of a vehicle, e.g. drag reduction, and more basic problems, such as the characterization of surface flows, e.g. with respect to flow control. The liquid crystal technique represents a promising diagnostics for measuring wall shear stress magnitude and orientation. In contrast to most other techniques, the direct measurement of two-dimensional wall shear stress distributions is straightforward. In order to establish quantitative measurements of wall shear stress using the liquid crystal technique, an in-depth understanding of the influencing parameters is required. For their investigation, a novel generic flat plate test section was designed. The experiments are performed in such a way that a turbulent boundary layer is triggered at a corresponding Reynolds number within the test section. Due to the generic test case, precise and well-known flow boundary conditions can be established, which in turn are validated by probe measurements. Velocity and temperature profiles are recorded with high spatial resolution using a miniaturized combined Pitot-thermocouple probe. Furthermore, the operational range of the new test rig is presented. Preliminary wall shear stress measurements confirm the well-defined flow conditions in the test section and the potential of the measurement technique.

Liquid crystal diagnostics is a capable tool for determining quantitative wall shear stress distributions with high spatial resolution, which can be applied to almost any surface shape. A standard consumer camera is typically used to record the scattered light of the liquid crystals as red, green, and blue RGB data. This RGB data has to be converted to a hue-based color space in order to perform a state-of-the-art calibration procedure. Algorithms for this purpose are numerous in the literature. However, a considerable number of them show a wide range of resulting hue values due to different trigonometric relations. This renders some conversion algorithms unsuitable for calculating physical wall shear stresses, as their magnitude and distribution depend on the conversion algorithm used. For this reason, the choice of an inappropriate conversion algorithm may compromise the measurement accuracy and subsequent comparability significantly. The main objective of this paper is to give recommendations for the use of appropriate algorithms to determine physical wall shear stresses. In a first step, synthetic liquid crystal data is converted using algorithms described in the literature. The preselected algorithms are then applied to liquid crystal data from a flat plate wind tunnel experiment to illustrate their influence on the determined uncalibrated wall shear stress distribution. The final discussion serves as guidelines for the post-processing of liquid crystal data and their subsequent comparability.