Near-Wall Flow Development After A Step Change In Surface Roughness

An experimental study of the initial flow field downstream of a step change in surface roughness is presented. The roughness length of the downstream surface was approximately tenfold that of the upstream roughness and, unlike all previous studies, attention was concentrated on the roughness sublayer region beneath the inertial (log-law) region. The experiments were conducted at a boundary layer Reynolds number of about 6 × 104 (based on layer thickness andfree-stream velocity) and around a longitudinal location where the (downstream) roughness length, zo2, was about 1% of the boundary-layer thickness atthe roughness change point.