The effect of a wall boundary layer on local mass transfer from a cylinder in a crossflow

A naphthalene sublimation technique is used to determine the circumferential and longitudinal variations of mass transfer from a smooth circular cylinder in a crossflow of air. The effect of the three-dimensional secondary flows near the wall-attached ends of a cylinder is discussed. For a cylinder Reynolds number of 19,000, local enhancement of the mass transfer over values in the center of the tunnel are observed up to a distance of 3.5 cylinder diameters from the tunnel wall. In a narrow span extending from the tunnel wall to about 0.066 cylinder diameters above it (about 0.75 of the mainstream boundary layer displacement thickness), increases of 90 to 700 percent over the two-dimensional flow mass transfer are measured on the front portion of the cylinder. Farther from the wall, local increases of up to 38 percent over the two-dimensional values are measured. In this region, increases of mass transfer in the rear portion of the cylinder, downstream of separation, are, in general, larger and cover a greater span than the increases in the front portion of the cylinder.