Hydrodynamic testing of a biological sharkskin replica manufactured using the vacuum casting method

Numerous facts have validated that sharkskin possesses the obvious drag reduction effect in certain turbulent flowing stations, and it has huge potential and important applications in the fields of agriculture, aerospace, industry, transportation, daily life and so on, which have attracted increased attention throughout the world. To meet the increasing requirements of practical applications, it has been progressively developing into an urgent problem to manufacture sharkskin surfaces with perfect forming quality and high drag-reducing effect. In this paper, the vacuum casting method is put forward to fabricate the drag-reducing surface with the real sharkskin morphology by eliminating the air bubbles from the bottom of sophisticated morphology in the pouring process. Meanwhile, a novel and facile "marking key point" method is explored and adopted to search for the corresponding biological sharkskin and negative template, a more convincing way to evaluate the replicating precision is systematically illustrated and the hydrodynamic experiment is carried out in the water tunnel. The results indicate that wall resistance over sharkskin surface replicated by the vacuum casting method can be decreased by about 12.5% compared with the smooth skin. In addition, the drag reduction mechanism hypotheses of sharkskin are generalized from different respects. This paper will improve the comprehension of the sharkskin fabrication method and expand biomimetic sharkskin technology into more applications in the fluid engineering.