Forcing Function Effects on Unsteady Aerodynamic Gust Response: Part 2—Low Solidity Airfoil Row Response

Abstract

The fundamental gust modeling assumption is investigated by means of a series of experiments performed in the Purdue Annular Cascade Research Facility. The unsteady periodic flow field is generated by rotating rows of perforated plates and airfoil cascades, with the resulting unsteady periodic chordwise pressure response of a downstream low-solidity stator row determined by miniature pressure transducers embedded within selected airfoils. When the forcing function exhibited the characteristics of a linear-theory vortical gust, as was the case for the perforated-plate wake generators, the resulting response on the downstream stator airfoils was in excellent agreement with the linear-theory models. In contrast, when the forcing function did not exhibit linear-theory vortical gust characteristics, i.e., for the airfoil wake generators, the resulting unsteady aerodynamic responses of the downstream stators were much more complex and correlated poorly with the linear-theory gust predictions. Thus, this investigation has quantitatively shown that the forcing function generator significantly affects the resulting gust response, with the complexity of the response characteristics increasing from the perforated-plate to the airfoil-cascade forcing functions.