Abstract
Deep cavities are present in car vehicles in numerous forms. Although drag downstream cavities have interested many authors, this aspect was never treated for particularly deep cavities. The objective of the present investigation is to study the effect of a deep cavity, characterized by its length-to-depth ratio L/H = 0.2, on both the skin friction coefficient and the statistic components of the streamwise velocity. Laser Doppler velocimetry (LDV) was used for the mean velocity and its statistic components measurements. Results obtained by other authors allowed a comparison between shallow and deep cavity configurations. The main conclusion is that with the same flow conditions, the drag increase downstream from the cavity is less important compared to the square cavity. A localized skewness coefficient decrease and a flatness coefficient increase could be related to intermittence ejection of flow from the downstream part of the cavity. This hypothesis was confirmed thanks to particle image velocimetry (PIV) measurements.