Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1712
VOL. 4, NO. 10
I.
Introduction
N many engineering applications of airfoils, the approaching flow is not uniform. When airplanes take off into
the wind, the approaching flow is nonunif orm because of wind
shear. The approaching flow to that section of the wing,
which is situated in the slipstream of the propeller, is nonuniform. The rotor blades of helicopters operate in the
wakes of the other blades; the propellers of ships operate in
the wake of the stern. In both cases, the propeller blades
are operating in a nonunif orm stream. It was the first instance cited that prompted Tsien1 to look into the problem
of shear flow past airfoils. He succeeded in obtaining the
exact solution of a uniform shear flow past a symmetric
Joukowsky airfoil. More recently, Sowyrda2 extended
Tsien's result to include cambered Joukowsky airfoils. To
obtain the effects of nonunif orm shear on airfoils, Jones3-4
considered the slightly parabolic and hyperbolic shear flows
past Joukowsky airfoils and elliptic cylinders. Experimentally the effect of stream shear on the maximum lift of
an airfoil has been investigated by Vidal.5 Recently,
Weissinger6 studied the exponential shear flow past airfoils.
Confining our attention to the case of uniform shear flow
past an airfoil, the disturbance flow is irrotational. By the
use of conformal mapping, such a flow past a cambered
Joukowsky airfoil has been obtained.1-2 For arbitrary foil
sections, the task is considerably more difficult. Since in
practice the airfoils are thin and of small camber, and the
angles of attack are usually small, it seems reasonable to
develop a perturbation method to calculate the pressure distributions and the force coefficients of the foil. The pressure distribution along the foil may give some indication
of the stalling characteristics of the foil.5
In this paper, we first systematically expand the components of the disturbance velocity into a power series in e,
which is a small parameter characterizing the size of small
disturbances. The vorticity of the approaching stream need
not be small, but must be of order 1. When the series expansions are substituted into the boundary conditions along
the airfoil, first- and the second-order problems present
themselves which are similar to those for an airfoil in uniReceived January 4, 1966; revision received May 31, 1966.
This research was supported by the U. S. Army Research office
(Durham), under Contract DA-31-124-ARO(D)-387. Abstract
of this paper was presented at the Fifth U. S. National Congress
of Applied Mechanics, University of Minnesota, June 14-17,
1966.
* Associate professor of Mechanical Engineering. Member
AIAA.
Systematic Expansions
Ky')
(1)
(2)
where
*o = Uny'[l + (K/2)y']
(3)
KUQ
(4)
V2t = 0
(5)
OCTOBER 1966
1713
(6)
0< x<1
(7)
(8)
u =
(9)
Fig. 1
(10)
It is noted that the ui, Viy ft, etc., are nondimensional. The
problem reduces now to finding an analytic complex velocity
w(z) = u iv of the complex variable z = x + iy with
singularities admitted at the leading edge and satisfying the
following boundary conditions: 1) at the foil surface,
sinea + v
cosea + u
(U)
- a(x - |)] +
a
2
- a(x - i)] }
C =
2K
(P - Poc
(13)
(14)
(19)
Pressure Expression
bU
bx
oy
(-*r\.
7^bx 7
av1 -
ft = ft(0, 0) -
ft = ft(0, 0) - JQ
(15)
(20)
dx
along?/ = 0db
bV
\bx ~
(17)
(16)
By substituting the series expansions of the velocity components, Eq. (8) and (9), and the definition of ^ into the
foregoing equation, we obtain the first- and second-order
pressure coefficients along the airfoil, y = 0 = b , 0 < # < 1:
= (U, V)
(12)
- (bU/by) = -UoK
dx
0<a;<l
(21)
C. F. CHEN
1714
-SOWYRDA ( r e f . 2 )
- 2 n d ORDER
AIAA JOURNAL
THEORY
TT JO
/K-5
/<*>*
Fig. 2 Lift coefficient of a symmetric
Joukowsky airfoil in
uniform shear flow
(r = 0.17, h = 0).
/K.I
^K=O
j, = 2 - 4
ri
+ 4K J Q ft(x)dx
/'(*)
(25)
The first-order moment coefficient is
1/2
20
40 c,degrees
30
foil
Cp cos[ea -
&Cpdx + e2
a+ 2
(2x -Vf'.
dx
- C
L l
(26)
&CPdx + 0(e3) =
eCLi + e*CL2 + 0(e3)
(27)
(22)
(28)
We write the boundary condition (14) on y2 as
(29)
A(x) = unft + u
- 2a(x + i)/c]
(30)
+ 2a(x - J)/f]
(31)
V' 2d?
,,
(32)
0(e3)
IV.
(23)
Solutions
It is noted that the flow shear has no effect on the firstorder boundary condition (13); however, it does have an
effect on the pressure coefficient, Eq. (19). The solution to
the first-order problem is the same as that for a uniform flow.
Following Lighthill,7 by considering two fundamental solutions, one being a symmetric (with respect to the x axis) and
the other yielding an antisymmetric velocity distribution, we
obtain the first-order complex velocity as
1 f i [Ka\t - |) + S'(&] (
- J 0 ^T| r^
X1/2
x/
(33)
S'(
^ (x - |
X
OCTOBER 1966
27
k +
0.0618
0.1179
0.1687
0.2150
0.2958
1 . 0476
1 . 0909
1 . 1304
1 . 1667
1 . 2308
V.
1715
1.0476
1.0907
1 . 1300
1 . 1656
1.2275
0.0131
0.0268
0.0409
0.0552
0.0829
0.0131
0.0270
0.0414
0.0561
0.0855
Examples
ft(x) =
I* + 3Z4
24(3) 1 <
0.0015
0.0033
0.0050
0.0066
0.0099
0.0015
0.0026
0.0041
0.0052
0.0071
1/2
24(3) */2
(38)
(35)
in which both h and r are of order e, to approximate a cambered Joukowsky airfoil. This approximation may not be
correct to the second order, since we have neglected any possible interaction terms between h and r. To avoid excessive
numerical computation, we shall only calculate the lift
coefficient for this foil at different angles of attack.
The lift coefficient, which is correct to the second order,
can be calculated according to Eqs. (25) and (33) together
with definitions (30) and (31) . The result is
3(3)1/2
(37)
0.0018
0.0066
0.0138
0.0230
0.0454
r(a + 2h)
(36)
The first two terms are the familiar linearized airfoil results.
It can be seen that thickness introduces by far the most important effect in a shear flow; it introduces both an added
camber effect and an increase in lift curve slope. Camber
introduces no first-order effect due to shear. There is no
S O W Y R D A (ref. 2)
2nd ORDER THEORY
20
30
40 ,degrees
10
30
40 o.,degrees
1716
C. F. CHEN
AIAA JOURNAL
-1.6
* = o = 1 - TS
16 '
-78
.(40)
Summary