Correcting hot-wire measurements of stream-wise turbulence intensity in boundary layers

The current experimental activity aimed at resolving the scaling of stream-wise turbulence intensity profiles uu¯+(y+) with Reynolds number in turbulent flat plate boundary layers has brought the largely unresolved issue of correcting systematic errors in hot-wire measurements of uu¯+(y+) into focus. Here, a heuristic scheme is proposed to generate unique uu¯+(y+;Reδ∗) profiles from data obtained with single hot wires of widely different length, aspect ratio and construction over a large Reynolds number range of 4000≲Reδ∗≲50 000. A comparison with LDA data and other checks suggest that the present correction scheme produces uu¯+(y+;Reδ∗) profiles close to the (unknown) true profiles.