Numerical Testing of a Trailing Edge Passive Morphing Control for Large Axial Fan Blades

Abstract

The concept of morphing geometry to control and stabilize the flow has been proposed and applied in several aeronautic and wind turbine applications. We studied the effect of a similar passive system applied on an axial fan blade, analyzing potential benefits and disadvantages associated to the passive coupling between fluid and structure dynamics. The present work completes a previous study made at the section level, giving a view also on the three-dimensional (3D) effects. We use the numerical computation to simulate the system, which defines a complex fluid–structure interaction (FSI) problem. In order to do that, an in-house finite element (FE) solver, already used in the previous study, is applied to solve the coupled dynamics.