Recently there has been a large push in the aircraft industry to reduce its carbon footprint. Laminar flow control and Natural Laminar Flow (NLF) wing design have been proposed as one of the main options for reducing the drag on the airplane and hence its fuel consumption. One of the important aspects of aircraft design concerns dynamic stability and an understanding of the unsteady behavior of NLF airfoils is important for predicting the stability characteristics of the aircraft. Recent experimental studies on NLF airfoils have shown that their dynamic behavior differs from that of turbulent airfoils and that classical linearized models for unsteady airfoils fail to predict the unsteady behavior of NLF airfoils. Most notably, NLF airfoils exhibit non-linear aerodynamic responses to small-amplitude pitch oscillations whereas the classical theories predict only a linear response. In the current work we investigate the dynamics of pitching airfoils to understand the flow phenomenon which causes the breakdown of classical models, and also attempt to describe a new simplified model which takes into account the non-linearities observed in the NLF airfoils.
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KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm (Sweden)
Computational & Scientific Engineering
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