CFD simulation of flow-induced vibration of an elastically supported airfoil

Abstract

Abstract. Flow-induced vibration of lifting or control surfaces in aircraft may lead to catastrophic consequences. Under certain circumstances, the interaction between the airflow and the elastic structure may lead to instability with energy transferred from the airflow to the structure and with exponentially increasing amplitudes of the structure. In the current work, a CFD simulation of an elastically supported NACA0015 airfoil with two degrees of freedom (pitch and plunge) coupled with 2D incompressible airflow is presented. The geometry of the airfoil, mass, moment of inertia, location of the centroid, linear and torsional stiffness was matched to properties of a physical airfoil model used for wind-tunnel measurements. The simulations were run within the OpenFOAM computational package. The results of the CFD simulations were compared with the experimental data.

Evaluation of Interferograms of Unsteady Subsonic Airflow Past a Fluttering Airfoil

“…Note that by using (9) only the pressure component of the drag and lift force is evaluated. However, it has been shown by numerical simulations that the viscous drag and lift is about three orders of magnitude lower [7], and thus it can be neglected. Unlike the PIV method, no automatic commercial software is available for the postprocessing and evaluation of the interferograms.…”