Gust alleviation strategy and mechanism for an airfoil encountering periodical vertical gusts

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The unsteady load caused by gusts (time-varying atmospheric wind disturbances) is an essential factor affecting flight safety. To mitigate gust loads, various flow control methods have been used. However, these methods are effective only in limited ranges, and a full theory of gust load reduction has been elusive. Here we propose a theoretical method for gust load reduction which we have validated through experiments for a certain range of gust amplitudes and frequencies. Our results show that the method reduces lift fluctuations by up to 90%, and provides insight into the relevant flow mechanism.