The injection of bubbles into a turbulent boundary layer can reduce the skin friction of a wall. Conventionally, the drag reduction rate is evaluated using time-averaged quantities of the mean gas flow rate or mean void fraction. Actually, as bubbles are subject to strong shear stresses near the wall, void waves and local bubble clusters appear. For pipe and channel flows, such wavelike behavior of the dispersed phase has been investigated intensely as an internal two-phase flow problem. We investigate how this wavy structure forms within the boundary layer as an external spatially developing two-phase flow along a horizontal flat plate. We describe how our model ship is designed to meet that purpose and report bubble-traveling behavior that accompanies unexpectedly strong wavy oscillations in the streamwise direction. A theoretical explanation based on a simplified two-fluid model is given to support this experimental fact, which suggests that void waves naturally stand out when drag reduction is enhanced through the local spatial gradient of the void fraction.
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