Design and Validation of a Probe for Spatially and Temporally Resolved Measurements of Vorticity and Strain Rates in Compressible Turbulence Interactions

Abstract

A custom-made hot-wire vorticity probe was designed and developed capable of measuring the time-dependent highly fluctuating three dimensional velocity and vorticity vectors, and associated total temperature, in non-isothermal and inhomogeneous flows with reasonable spatial and temporal resolution. These measurements allowed computation of the vorticity stretching/tilting terms, vorticity generation through dilatation terms, full dissipation rate of the kinetic energy term and full rate-of-strain tensor. The probe has been validated experimentally in low-speed boundary layers and used in the CCNY Shock Tube Research Facility, where interactions of planar expansion waves or shock waves with homogeneous and isotropic turbulence have been investigated at several Reynolds numbers.

Keywords

• vorticity measurements
• compressible turbulence
• shock and expansion waves