Publication Date:
1997-02-25
Description:
The stability of the incompressible attachment-line boundary layer has been studied by Hall, Malik & Poll (1984) and more recently by Lin & Malik (1996). These studies, however, ignored the effect of leading-edge curvature. In this paper, we investigate this and leading-edge curvature. The results show that the leading-edge curvature has a stabilizing influence on the attachment-line boundary layer and that the inclusion of curvature in both the mean-flow and stability equations contributes to this stabilizing effect. The effect of curvature can be characterized by the Reynolds number Ra (based on the leading-edge radius). For Ra = 104, the critical Reynolds number R̄ (based on the attachment-line boundary-layer length scale, see §2.2) for the onset of instability is about 637; however, when Ra increases to about 106 the critical Reynolds number approaches the value obtained earlier without curvature effect.
Print ISSN:
0022-1120
Electronic ISSN:
1469-7645
Topics:
Mechanical Engineering, Materials Science, Production Engineering, Mining and Metallurgy, Traffic Engineering, Precision Mechanics
,
Physics
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