Unsteady wall pressure field of a model A-pillar conical vortex

The spatio-temporal properties of the unsteady wall pressure field of a model A-pillar conical vortex are studied in this paper by combining 2 component LDV measurements and multi-point pressure measurements using off-set microphones. The model body has sharp edges. Detailed LDV measurements are presented and discussed in the vortex region. The fluctuating velocities are the signature of both an unsteady behaviour of the organised vortical structure interacting with the wall and of finer scale turbulence carried by the unsteady flow. A spectral analysis of the fluctuating pressure under the vortex core is used to analyse the link between the temporal and spatial scales of the unsteady aerodynamics and the wall pressure field. We show that the conical vortex is a guide for the velocity perturbations and that their hydrodynamic pressure footprint is transported at the measured mean axial velocity in a local reference frame aligned with the vortex core. Two distinct peaks of coherence can then be associated with perturbations having (i) a length scale of the order of the full length of the conical structure; (ii) a length scale of the order of the width of the structure. These perturbations may correspond to a global meandering of the structure (low frequency contribution) and to large scale perturbations generated during the rolling-up of the unsteady vortex sheet. Notably, the energy containing higher frequency parts of the PSD are only weakly correlated when distant sensors are considered. The three distinct contributions extracted here have a significant impact as far as Cp’ is concerned and should be transmitted in very different ways by the car structure because the frequency and length scale range is very distinct.