A Note on the Estimation of Average Pressures from Instantaneous Velocities in Unsteady Flow

Extract

In a recent paper, the author described some experiments in which the average base pressure on a two-dimensional bluff body was estimated from a random sample of instantaneous velocity measurements taken in the irrotational flow outside the separating boundary layers at the trailing edge. Although the oncoming stream was steady, the flow near the model was subject to a periodic disturbance emanating from the wake vortex street. An experimental check showed that the pressure estimates obtained by using the steady Bernouilli equation were reasonably accurate. This note points out that the method of data reduction used in ref. 1 is not an approximation; it is exact.