Effects of Localized Micro-blowing on a Spatially Developing Flat Turbulent Boundary Layer

Direct numerical simulation (DNS) is used to investigate the turbulent flat-plate boundary layer with localized micro-blowing. The 32 × 32 array of micro-holes is arranged in a staggered pattern on the solid wall, located in the developed turbulent region. The porosity of the porous wall is 23%, and the blowing fraction is 0.0015. The Reynolds number based on the inflow velocity is set to be 50,000. The structures of the turbulent boundary layer are carefully analyzed to understand the effects of micro-blowing and its drag reduction mechanism. The DNS results show that the drag reduction is efficient, and the local maximum rate of drag reduction achieves 40%. A low-speed “turbulent spot” near the micro-blowing region thickens the boundary layer. Some turbulent properties, such as the mean velocity profile, stream-wise vorticity and stream-wise velocity fluctuation are lifted up. Particularly, the tilting term of vorticity transport is significantly increased. Meanwhile, the visualization of 3-dimensional vortex displays several concave marks on the surface of the near-wall vortices, which is caused by the micro-jets, leading to more broken vortices and isotropic small scales. This impact travels downstream with a small distance due to the accumulation of the micro-jets, while the uplift effect will gradually disappear. In addition, FIK identity reveals that the spatial development term and mean wall-normal convection term play opposite roles in the contribution to the skin friction drag.