Flow about a slotted cylinder-airfoil combination in a wind tunnel

The flowfield around a gust generator device, an airfoil/rotat ing slotted cylinder (RSC) system, is numerically simulated using the general-purpose finite element program FIDAP. The flow is assumed to be quasisteady, turbulent, incompressible, and two dimensional. The turbulence is modeled far from the walls by a high Reynolds number k-e model. In the near-wall region, which includes the viscous sublayer, the mixing length concept is used to model turbulence. The numerical analysis treats the time-varying flow around the gust generator device as quasisteady and solves the flow position-by-position as the RSC rotates. The variation of lift and drag as a function of the rotation angle and as a function of the gap between the airfoil and the rotating slotted cylinder is calculated.