NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF AIR FLOW OVER A THIN OIL FILM Dziedzic, William M. Turbulent boundary layer flow research uses oil film and oil drop interferometry to measure wall shear stress of air flows. Oil film interferometry determines the rate oil decreases on a surface as the function of the shear stress magnitude. Current traditional methods have proven to be accurate but the solution is obtained by assuming a linear height distribution [3]. This assumes a constant shear stress along the oil drop and assures that there is no effect of the oil drop on the incoming boundary layer [3]. This effect maintains the continuity of shear stress at the air/oil interface, but the stream-wise velocity at the interface is discontinuous. It is thought that these approximations contain small errors but this has not been verified for zero pressure gradient turbulent boundary layer [3]. A computational fluid dynamics numerical study was performed to simulate the two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) effects of air flow over an oil drop and the drop’s movement across the channel surface. M.S. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, December 2014 Nagib, Hassan 2014 2014-12 Thesis application/pdf islandora:9152 http://hdl.handle.net/10560/3429 MMAE / Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering Illinois Institute of Technology en In Copyright http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/ Restricted Access