Unsteady Aerodynamics and Gapwise Periodicity of Oscillating Cascaded Airfoils

Abstract

Tests were conducted on a linear cascade of airfoils oscillating in pitch to measure the unsteady pressure response on selected blades along the leading edge plane of the cascade and over the chord of the center blade. The pressure data were reduced to Fourier coefficient form for direct comparison and were also processed to yield integrated loads and, particularly, the aerodynamic damping coefficient. In addition, results from two unsteady theories for cascaded blades with nonzero thickness and camber were compared with the experimental measurements. The three primary results that emerged from this investigation were: (a) from the leading edge plane blade data, the cascade was judged to be periodic in unsteady flow over the range of parameters tested, (b) as before, the interblade phase angle was found to be the single most important parameter affecting the stability of the oscillating cascade blades, and (c) the real blade theory and the experiment were in excellent agreement for the several cases chosen for comparison.