Performance Analysis of a Symmetric Airfoil with Double Cylinder Configuration

Abstract

Application of moving surface in the increment of airfoil performance has been a challenging field of research for the engineers. One way of creating moving surface is incorporation of rotating cylinder at suitable locations of an airfoil. For example, this cylinder may be incorporated at the leading edge, trailing edge, forward upper surface, rearward uppersurface etc. Experimentally, incorporating single cylinder on airfoil and investigating its performance is much easier compared to double cylinder configuration because of mechanical complexity. Thus, this research aims at the performance analysis of a symmetric airfoil with double cylinder configuration through simulation. For this, a symmetric airfoil was chosen and one cylinder was incorporated at the leading edge of airfoil and another one was incorporated at forward-upper surface of the airfoil. Flow analysis was conducted over the airfoil at various angles of attack at different Reynolds numbers. At these Reynolds numbers the cylinders were also rotated at various rpm and the effect of them were realized through the analysis of the results. This research showed how the two-cylinder configuration on an airfoil can contribute in the performance increment of a symmetric airfoil.