Flying-hot-wire study of two-dimensional mean flow past an NACA 4412 airfoil at maximum lift

Abstract

Hot-wire measurements have been made in the boundary layer, the separated region, and the near wake for flow past an NACA 4412 airfoil at maximum lift. The Reynolds number based on chord was about 1,500, 000. Special care was taken to achieve a two-dimensional mean flow. The main instrumentation was a flying hot wire; that is, a hot-wire probe mounted on the end of a rotating arm. The probe velocity was sufficiently high to avoid the usual rectification problem by keeping the relative flow direction always within a range of ±30 degrees to the probe axis. A digital computer was used to control synchronized sampling of hot-wire data at closely spaced points along the probe arc. Ensembles of data were obtained at several thousand locations in the flow field. The data include intermittency, two components of mean velocity, and twelve mean values for double, triple, and quadruple products of two velocity fluctuations. No information was obtained about the third (spanwise) velocity component. An unexpected effect of rotor interference was identified and brought under control. The data are available on punched cards in raw form and also after use of smoothing and interpolation routines to obtain values on a fine rectangular grid aligned with the airfoil chord. The data are displayed in the paper as contour plots.