A Silicon Transducer for the Determination of Wall-Pressure Fluctuations in Turbulent Boundary Layers

Journal article, 1993

Small and sensitive silicon sensors for turbulent wall-pressure fluctuation measurements have been designed and fabricated using microelectronic technology. For the detection of the pressure fluctuations piezoresistive gauges are placed on a diaphragm and the resistance of these gauges depends on the stresses in the diaphragm. For the determination of the performance of these pressure transducers comparisons with conventional microphones were carried out in a well-defined two-dimensional boundary layer. Power spectra from the silicon pressure transducer revealed a slope in the inertial sublayer corresponding approximately to the 1/3-law of Kolmogorov, and the normalized wall-pressure fluctuations agreed well with other direct measurements.