Boundary layer transition determination for periodic and static flows using phase-averaged pressure data

A method of boundary layer transition measurement is presented for wind tunnel models instrumented with surface pressure taps. The measurement relies on taking a number of theoretically identical measurements at different times and then analysing the standard deviation of the pressures. Due to the slight unsteady movement of the transition position, a peak in the standard deviation of pressure \(\sigma C_{P_{{\rm peak}}}\) is found at the transition position, and this is correlated with measurements of the transition position with an infrared camera and hot-film anemometers. In contrast to microphone measurements, it is shown that the transition detection works for data which have been low-pass filtered with a cut-off of 1 Hz. The application to static and dynamic transition measurements on static and periodically pitching helicopter rotor blade airfoils at Mach 0.3–0.5 is demonstrated.