Turbulent roughness drag due to surface waviness at low roughness Reynolds numbers

The current investigation has the objective to provide data which will make it possible to obtain a better estimate regarding the roughness drag for surface waviness. The data employed for this investigation were acquired in connection with a wavy wall study which was conducted as part of an overall program to reduce the skin friction of turbulent boundary layers in external flows. The results of the present investigation show that the low-speed roughness drag of small-amplitude sinusoidal wave trains having wavelengths of the order of the boundary-layer thickness is not only a function of h/lambda (h = total wave height, lambda = wavelength), but, in addition, is also a function of the roughness Reynolds number.