Towards decoupling the effects of permeability and roughness on turbulent boundary layers

Abstract: Boundary layer flow over a realistic porous wall might contain both the effects of wall-permeability and wall-roughness. These two effects are typically examined in the context of a rough-wall flow, i.e., by defining a ``roughness'' length or equivalent to capture the effect of the surface on momentum deficit/drag. In this work, we examine the hypothesis of Esteban et al. (2022), that a turbulent boundary layer over a porous wall could be modelled as a superposition of the roughness effects on the permeability effects by using independently obtained information on permeability and roughness. We carry out wind tunnel experiments at high Reynolds number ($14400 \leq Re_{\tau} \leq 33100$) on various combinations of porous walls where different roughnesses are overlaid over a given permeable wall. Measurements are also conducted on the permeable wall as well as the rough walls independently to obtain the corresponding lengthscales. Analysis of mean flow data across all these measurements suggests that an empirical formulation can be obtained where the momentum deficit ($\Delta U^+$) is modelled as a combination of independently obtained roughness and permeability lengthscales. This formulation assumes the presence of outer-layer similarity across these different surfaces, which is shown to be valid at high Reynolds numbers. Finally, this decoupling approach is equivalent to the area-weighted power-mean of the respective permeability and roughness lengthscales, consistent with the approach recently suggested by Hutchins et al. (2023) to capture the effects of heterogeneous rough surfaces.