Performance of a transverse vorticity probe in a turbulent channel flow

Abstract

 The performance of a four hot-wire transverse vorticity probe is tested by comparing measurements in a fully developed turbulent channel flow with corresponding data obtained from direct numerical simulations (DNS) of the same flow. In the inner region, the probe performs poorly, the rms vorticities being consistently smaller than the DNS values. In the outer region of the flow, there is reasonable agreement between measured and DNS vorticity statistics, especially after correcting the measurements for the effect of spatial resolution. In this region, the imbalance indicated by the vorticity form of the streamwise momentum equation is approximately constant. The magnitude of the imbalance can be reduced to an acceptable level of accuracy by considering sources of error which affect the velocity–vorticity correlations.