Book Description
A combination of visual and quantitative measurements is presented, providing a physical picture of the turbulent boundary layer flow structure on a flat plate. The flow structure is shown to consist of three zones, each zone has a one to one correspondence to the well known regions of the u+, y+ mean velocity profile. A wall layer region is shown to exist below y+ = 10. An apparently fully turbulent region exists corresponding to the logarithmic ''law of the wall'' and the ''buffer'' region. An intermittent zone appears to agree closely with the ''wake'' deviation region. An entirely new result of the investigation is the delineation of the structure of the wall layer region. This region is shown to contain a relatively regular structure of low and high velocity fluid streaks alternating in the span direction, together with the ejection of low momentum fluid into the outer flow. Correlations are given for the rate of ejection and the streak spacing. A qualitative description of other features of the wall layer region and the character of the remainder of the boundary layer flow structure is presented. (Author).