Unsteady flow structure of an airfoil in ground effect

Particle image velocimetry （PIV） experimental results of wake flow structure of a NACA0012 airfoil with small attack angle mounted above water surface are introduced.The experiment was carried out in a small-scale wind-wave tunnel.The diameter of wind-wave tunnel test section is 1.7 m （long） × 0.4 m （width） × 0.4 m （height）.The flow fields around the airfoil were measured under four diffierent conditions by varying the distance between the airfoil and the water surface.The attack angle of the airfoil was kept 10- during the experiment.For each experimental condition,the time series of particle images was captured to calculate continuous evolution of the velocity fields.The velocity fields were ensemble averaged to get the statistic parameters such as mean velocity and vorticity.Typical instantaneous velocity fields for each case are introduced to show the basic flow structure of wind surface flow separation.The aerodynamic loads acting on the airfoil are analyzed qualitatively according to the mean vorticity distribution in the flow field based on the theory of vorticity aerodynamics.The results indicate that the flow structures and drag/lift force of the airfoil alter remarkably with the changing distance between the airfoil and water surface.

PIV MEASUREMENTS OF THE NEAR-WAKE FLOW OF AN AIRFOIL ABOVE A FREE SURFACE

The near-wake flow of a NACA0012 airfoils mounted above a water surface were experimentally studied in a wind/wave tunnel. The main objective of this study is to investigate the influence of the free surface on the structure of the airfoil trailing wake. The flow structure was measured with different ride heights between the airfoil and free surface using a Particle Image Velocimetry （PIV） system. The Reynolds number based on the chord length of the airfoil was about 3.5×10^3. For each experimental condition, large amount of instantaneous velocity fields were captured and ensemble-averaged to get the spatial distributions of mean velocity and mean vorticity, as well as turbulence statistics. The results show that the flow structures of the airfoil wake varies remarkably with the change in the ride height.

An experimental investigation on the trailing edge cooling of turbine blades

An experimental study was conducted to quantify the flow characteristics of the wall jets pertinent to trailing edge cooling of turbine blades.A high-resolution stereoscopic particle image velocimetry(PIV)system was used to conduct detailed flow field measurements to quantitatively visualize the evolution of the unsteady vortices and turbulent flow structures in the cooling wall jet streams and to quantify the dynamic mixing process between the cooling jet stream and the mainstream flows.The detailed flow field measurements were correlated with the adiabatic cooling effectiveness maps measured by using pressure sensitive paint(PSP)technique to elucidate underlying physics in order to explore/optimize design paradigms for improved cooling effectiveness to protect the critical portions of turbine blades from harsh environments.