An experimental study of turbulent convective heat transfer from a flat plate

Abstract

A turbulent boundary layer developing on a smooth heated uniform-temperature plate in a zero pressure gradient was set up. The origins of the layers were matched to remove the effect of an In heated starting length. Similarity proposals were tested. The mean flow field followed the usual law of the wall and defect law for both temperature and velocity. Broad-band measurements of stream wise velocity and temperature fluctuations were made, and wall similarity and Townsend's self-preserving flow similarity were found to be applicable, at least after a sufficient flow development. Some initial attempts to arrive at a comparison between heat and momentum transport are presented. The results include conditionally sampled measurements of instantaneous heat and momentum fluxes and correlations between these two quantities. The fluxes were divided into quadrants. Conditional probabilities and weighted joint probability density functions were measured to determine whether there was a similarity in behaviour of these two fluxes. The concept of ‘hole size’ developed for momentum flux was extended to heat flux and events corresponding to bursts and sweeps in the momentum flux were found to be accompanied by corresponding events in the heat flux.