Drag Reduction in Turbulent Boundary Layers with Half Wave Wall Oscillations

Abstract

Spatial square waves with positive cycle are used as steady forcing technique to study drag reduction effects on a turbulent boundary layer flow. Pseudospectral method is used for performing direct numerical simulations on very high resolution grids. A smooth step function is employed to prevent Gibbs phenomenon at the sharp discontinuities of a square wave. The idea behind keeping only the positive cycle of the spatial forcing is to reduce the power consumption to boost net power savings. For some spatial frequency of the oscillations with half waves, it is possible to prevent recovery of skin friction back to the reference case values. A set of wall oscillation parameters is numerically simulated to study its effect on the power budget.