The behaviour of a plane jet issuing in the neighbourhood of a plane wall has been studied experimentally. Such arrangements may find application in jet augmented flaps for STOL aircraft development. The essential features of this configuration are the gap between the wall and the jet nozzle, permitting entrainment of secondary flow, and the inclination of the plane wall with respect to the nozzle axis.

Measurements of velocity profiles, wall static pressure distributions and turbulence intensities reveal the presence of extensive regions of low pressure over the wall, strong pressure gradients resulting in the highly curved flow, a fair degree of self-preservation of the mean velocities, but no particularly unusual features observed in the turbulence quantities. The size of the gap, the wall angle and the wall length all influence the reattachment location, and limits of gap, angle and length for which reattachment occurs are shown. The sub-ambient static pressure regions give rise to significant forces on the wall; these forces are primarily due to the entrainment feature.

The results of measurements in the flow along a rectangular corner are presented in the form of velocity profiles. The profiles form two sets: one for flow in a slightly favourable streamwise pressure gradient and one for flow when the pressure gradient is ‘practically zero’. The appearance of the profiles is quite different from that of previously reported experimental work and it is suggested here that the primary cause of this is the different type of corner leading edges used in each case. The flow appears to be only marginally stable and even very slightly changed entry conditions caused by alterations in the leading edge geometry may have a marked effect on the profiles further downstream. The new results are consistent with the notion of corner layer similarity (an implication in every attempted theoretical solution) but there remains a significant difference between the experimental results and the more reliable theoretical solutions available.

Flow measurement by optical devices of various types, particularly those involving laser light sources, have received considerable attention over the last few years. Different schemes employing a wide range of optical layouts have evolved and the resulting signals have been processed in a number of ingenious ways. We report new experimental work on an optical instrument that can be considered as the forerunner of the laser anemometer in the belief that in certain circumstances this particular optical layout offers some real advantages over the majority of laser anemometers. One important advantage of this system is the ease with which both the shape and size of the sampling zone can be independently controlled. Another is the ability to position the sampling region very close to a boundary without having to contend with the surface reflection difficulties that often prevent such measurements being made with laser optics. The instrument measures the velocities of small particles suspended in the fluid in much the same way as the laser anemometer. In unsteady flows this results in a series of velocity estimates generated at random time instants. These intermittent samples of the velocity are used to form power spectral density estimates by methods recently developed for the analysis of randomly sampled records (Gaster and Roberts, 1975 & 1976). This method of analysis could well be applied to the processing of the signals generated by laser anemometers operating in the burst counter mode.

The basic physical idea underlying the theories based on the flow model of CHAPMAN and KORST is that the base pressure can be predicted if the pressure at the reattachment point is known. In the new theory of TANNER the fundamental idea is the connection between the drag of the body and the entropy increase in the flow. This paper presents the essence of both theories together with theoretical and experimental results.