IR thermographic visualization of flow separation in applications with low thermal contrast

A measurement method for IR thermographic visualization of separated flow on rotor blades for wind turbines is demonstrated. Flow separation has a negative influence on the performance of airfoils, e.g., at wind turbine rotors. Thermographic flow visualization is a non-invasive measurement technique to identify different flow regimes, but the visualization of separated flow without explicit additional heating of the measured object has not been possible to date. For this reason, a measurement approach with an enhanced sensitivity is presented, which evaluates temporal temperature fluctuations from a thermographic images series by means of the standard deviation as well as the analysis of selected Fourier coefficients. The approach is validated by wind tunnel experiments with a non-heated circular cylinder as well as a 2D 6 digit NACA-airfoil. The flow and measurement conditions are chosen to be similar to wind turbines in operation. As a result, the flow regimes including the flow separation are resolved and are in agreement with reference measurements, while the sensitivity of standard thermographic flow visualization was too low. In addition, the Fourier analyses method results in an improvement of the contrast to noise ratio between turbulent and separated flow by 11.6 % compared to the evaluation of the temperature standard deviation. Further improvements are expected in future when taking the complete spatiotemporal temperature fluctuations into account.