Study on airfoil performance in gusts

Abstract

With the projected rapid increase in demand for aviation transport and with it, the surge in the number of passengers in the air, it is imperative for the aviation industry to place safety as their top priority. Although much resources and efforts have been invested into improving maintenance practices and their related technologies, there is still a general inadequacy in the understanding of the behavior of aircraft in strong wind gusts, where pilot experience is often relied upon to avert disasters. Today, majority of the wind tunnels provide experimentation on steady flows, however, they do not account for the real world scenarios whereby there may be rapid changes in wind speed and direction. Hence, this project contributes to this by redesigning and developing a suitable mechanism to generate considerable wind gusts in wind tunnels. The first objective of this project is to design a gust generator operating on four rotating airfoils to generate significant unsteady gusts. The second objective would be to conduct a parametric study on the various factors, such as the oscillation frequency, oscillation amplitude, and the various arrangements that affect the performance of the gust generator. The downstream flow is studied by analyzing the effects of the generated gusts on a symmetric airfoil which correlates to a vertical stabilizer on an aircraft. The gust generator was proved to be successful in attaining the desired significant crosswind gust angles, further experimentation was also attempted with a 5-hole probe system to obtain more precise instantaneous readings. The results and analysis from this project could be used to pave the way and provide a basis for further experimentation on aircraft performance in crosswind and unsteady flow conditions.