Detailed Characterisation, using PIV, of flow around an Airfoil in High-Lift Configuration

Abstract

Within the framework of the European Union's EUROPIV-2 programme, experiments using Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) were performed in the low-speed wind tunnel of Airbus Bremen, Germany. The goal was to investigate the flow over a two-dimensional, slat/wing/flap model in a high-lift configuration. For this, a system for acquiring PIV data from multiple cameras simultaneously was devised and installed underneath the wind tunnel. The PIV experiments were performed at the mid-span of the model, for incidences of 12°, 17.5° and 19°. Nearly 5000 PIV images were obtained, the images capturing the flow fields from the slat wake, slat/wing-gap, flow mixing over the main wing, wing/flap-gap and wing wake. The analysis of the results reveals that PIV is feasible in industrial-type wind tunnel tests, with high-quality data revealing the unsteady nature of the flow around high-lift configurations, the mixing that occurs across wakes, plus intermittent flow separation over the flap.