The turbulent boundary layer and wake of an aligned flat plate (Q1111415): Difference between revisions

A theoretical study of the turbulent boundary layer and symmetric wake of an aligned flat plate is described. A specific turbulence model is taken throughout, namely the Cebeci-Smith one [\textit{T. Cebeci} and \textit{A. M. O. Smith}, Analysis of turbulent boundary layers (1974; Zbl 0342.76014)] although at the high Reynolds numbers of interest the wake results are found subsequently to be influenced hardly at all by the precise details of the model, so that there is a ready generalization. The two-tiered wake implied by the analysis is rather different from the two-tiered boundary layer. The inner tier of the wake is thicker than the boundary layer's inner tier and, associated with this, the ``logarithmic'' zone present in the boundary layer upstream is absent in the wake, being replaced by a ``cuspidal'' zone just outside the inner-wake tier due to the reduction in shear stresses. Local interactive regions near the trailing edge show how the erosion of the logarithmic behaviour takes place relatively fast, being virtually complete on entry into the full wake. The agreement between the theory, experiments and previous computations for the boundary layer and full wake is found to be good quantitatively as well as qualitatively, encouraging the use of the present approach in other contexts such as turbulent separation.