Numerical Study of Unsteady Flow Around Airfoil With Spoiler

A discrete vortex model based on the panel method has been developed to simulate the two-dimensional unsteady separated flow generated by the rapid deployment of a spoiler on the upper surface of an airfoil. This method represents the boundary surfaces by distributing piecewise linear-vortex and constant source singularities on discrete panels. The wake of the spoiler and airfoil is represented by discrete vortices. At each sharp edge, a vortex sheet is used to feed discrete vortices at every time-step to form the downstream wake. The length and strength of each shed vortex sheet are determined by the continuity equation and a condition such that the flow, the net force, and the pressure difference across the vortex sheet are zero. The flow patterns behind the spoiler at different time-steps are presented. The pressure distributions on the airfoil based on the unsteady Bernoulli’s equation are compared, where possible, with the experimental results and other computational results. The adverse lift effects have been obtained, and similar effects have been measured in experiments.