Experimental and Computational Study of 2D Smooth Wall Turbulent Boundary Layers in Pressure Gradient

This paper describes a collaborative experimental and computational study of smooth wall boundary layers in a systematic family of favorable and adverse pressure gradients. The objective is to advance turbulence modeling of these flows, in particular the effects of pressure gradients that can be classified as non-equilibrium. This collaboration is a component of the larger NATO AVT-349 Research Task Group. Experiments under this effort are conducted at Virginia Tech and computational efforts are presented from Virginia Tech, the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the University of Melbourne, Chalmers University of Technology, the Maritime Research Institute Netherlands (MARIN) in conjunction with the University of Lisbon Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) (MARIN/IST), and the Sirehna Naval Group. This paper describes some of the key elements of the experimental and computational approaches, the efforts made for cross discipline collaboration, verification, and validation, and reports on some initial results and findings. The agreement between various RANS solutions and RANS turbulence models and between RANS solutions and experiment are generally good, but questions remain as to the efficacy of RANS modeling for non-equilibrium boundary layer flows and some potential directions for future investigations are suggested.