Pressure Measurement Systems

Measurements of the steady pressure in a fluid flow may be required to determine other thermodynamic properties, to determine forces on a body due to the pressure distribution over it, or in order to determine the dynamic head and flow velocity (for further details on the latter see Sect. 5.1. Pressure is a scalar representation of molecular activity, a measure of the nondirectional molecular motions. Thus it must, by definition, be measured by a device at rest relative to the flow. Whilst the common practice in the fluid mechanics community is to denote the pressure as static (as opposed to the coordinate-dependent total pressure, Sect. 3.1), this terminology introduces a fundamental redundancy. In practice, pressure is commonly measured both at walls and in the freestream using the types of measurement device shown in Fig. 4.1 connected to a transducer of suitable sensitivity and range. The orifice of a small wall tapping represents a simple way to obtain the pressure impressed on the wall by the external flow. So-called static pressure tubes approximate the local fluid pressure in the freestream if the disturbance presented to the flow can either be accounted for or is not large to begin with. However this can only ever be strictly true for steady laminar flow due to the normal velocity component introduced when a flow becomes turbulent. Measurement of freestream pressure is one of the hardest challenges in fluid mechanics. Fig. 4.1 This chapter addresses measurement of pressure using wall tappings (Sect. 4.1) and static pressure tubes (Sect. 4.2), and especially errors due to the intrusive flow presence of real, finite-sized devices and calibrations to correct for these. Bryer and Pankhurst [4.1] and Chue [4.2] provided seminal monographs on the general topic of pressure probes in 1971 and 1975, respectively, which give detailed descriptions of measurement devices, coverage of the background to the various corrections and a survey of older data. The topic is covered here more concisely, with a view to practical use by the engineer, and with reference to modern literature. The reader is referred to Bryer and Pankhurst [4.1] and Chue [4.2] for further details on most sections. In more recent years a further method for obtaining pressure on the surface of a wind tunnel model has been developed, based on pressure sensitive paints (PSP). The introduction of PSP provides a method to measure the pressure on the surface of a model directly without the transducers and tubing associated with conventional means. A paint, the luminescence of which is dependent on air pressure, is applied to the surface of a wind tunnel model and the pressure distribution is obtained from the images produced by proper illumination. In Sect. 4.4 the basics of PSP are discussed and further subsections address in detail different paints, paint application procedures, imaging systems and image processing. In discussing the achievable accuracy of PSP techniques, both the spatial and temporal resolution is examined. The thermal sensitivity of the paint dye is introduced and this is closely linked to temperature-sensitive paints (TSP), as discussed in Chap. 7, Sect. 7.4