Surface Skin Friction Measurement and Visualization Based on Compliant Coatings

New method and means are proposed to measure the skin friction force on an aerodynamic surface based on elastic deformations of silicon rubber and gel coatings. One of characteristics is soft and easy to deform. Object is coated by elastic polymeric film with known shear modulus. Two images between wind-on and wind-off are taken using the CCD camera. The displacement of coating is calculated from the correlation of two images. There are two ways to calibrate the skin friction force to the displacement of coatings. These methods are tested and compared to quantitative skin friction force measurement. One is based on measuring the characteristics of the polymeric film using visco-elastic measurement system. This way is called as a priori calibration. The other way is accomplished from the relation between the skin friction force measured by the PHF embedded on the object and the displacement around there and is known as In-situ method. Characteristics of the coatings such as the displacement and the time response can be easily controlled by the compounding ratio of hardener. We conduct the theoretical analysis for the elastic polymer film and propose the material properties of the coatings required to measure the surface skin friction in the wide range of flow speed. The skin friction over the plate is measured using this technique in various Reynolds number. The traditional measurement using the hot wire anemometry is conducted to validate this technique. The time averaged measurements of this technique are in good agreement with the traditional results. However, the unsteady characteristics of surface skin friction are not captured by the lack of time resolution of the CCD camera.