Near-Surface Boundary Layer Turbulence Along a Horizontally-Moving, Surface-Piercing Vertical Wall

Abstract: The complex interaction between turbulence and the free surface in boundary layer shear flow created by a vertical surface-piercing wall is considered. A laboratory-scale device was built that utilizes a surface-piercing stainless steel belt that travels in a loop around two vertical rollers, with one length of the belt between the rollers acting as a horizontally-moving flat wall. The belt is accelerated suddenly from rest until reaching constant speed in order to create a temporally-evolving boundary layer analogous to the spatially-evolving boundary layer that would exist along a surface-piercing towed flat plate. Surface profiles are measured with a cinematic laser-induced fluorescence system and sub-surface velocity fields are recorded using a high-speed planar particle image velocimetry system. It is found that the belt initially travels through the water without creating any significant waves, before the free surface bursts with activity close to the belt surface. These free surface ripples travel away from the belt before appearing to become freely-propagating waves. From sub-surface velocity measurements, it is found that close to the surface, transition to turbulence happens sooner than far from the surface, leading to an overall thicker boundary layer in the vicinity of the free surface. A secondary peak in streamwise velocity fluctuations accompanies this transition to turbulence and this peak reaches a maximum value a short time later before smoothing outward. Using momentum thickness as a length scale and the streamwise velocity fluctuations at the location of this outer peak as a velocity scale, free surface bursting and air entrainment onset are found to depend in some way on Weber number and agreement is found with scaling arguments for air entrainment presented by Brocchini and Pregrine (J. Fluid Mech., 499, 225-254, 2001).