Dynamic wall-shear stress measurements in turbulent pipe flow using the micro-pillar sensor MPS3

The micro-pillar wall-shear stress sensor MPS3 has been used to measure the dynamic wall-shear stress in turbulent pipe flow. The sensor device consists of a flexible micro-pillar which extends from the wall into the viscous sublayer. The pillar-tip deflection caused by the exerting fluid forces serves as a measure for the local wall-shear stress. The pillar is statically calibrated in linear shear flow. A second-order estimate of the pillar dynamic response based on experimentally determined sensor characteristics shows the potential of the present sensor configuration to also measure the dynamic wall-shear stress. The quality of the micro-pillar shear stress sensor MPS3 to correctly determine the skin friction will be shown by measuring the wall friction in a well-defined fully developed turbulent pipe flow at Reynolds numbers Re b based on the bulk velocity U b and the pipe diameter D in the range of Re b = 10 , 000 – 20 , 000 . The results demonstrate a convincing agreement of the mean and dynamic wall-shear stress obtained with the MPS3 sensor technique with analytical, experimental, and numerical results from the literature.