Efficacy of single-component MTV to measure turbulent wall-flow velocity derivative profiles at high resolution

Abstract

Physical interpretations and especially analytical considerations benefit from the ability to accurately estimate derivatives of experimentally measured statistical profiles. Toward this aim, experiments were conducted to investigate the efficacy of single-component molecular tagging velocimetry (1c-MTV) to measure mean velocity profiles that can be differentiated multiple times. Critical effects here pertain to finite measurement uncertainty in the presence of high spatial resolution. Measurements acquired in fully developed turbulent channel flow over a friction Reynolds number range from 390 to 1800 are used to investigate these issues. Each measured profile contains about 880 equally spa..