Experiments on the Flow at the Nose of a Thin Airfoil

Citation

Doering, Eugene Richard (1959) Experiments on the Flow at the Nose of a Thin Airfoil. Engineer's thesis, California Institute of Technology. doi:10.7907/6NZA-Q027. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechETD:etd-01192006-081801

Abstract

An investigation of a family of two-dimensional airfoils was conducted in the Merrill Wind Tunnel at California Institute of Technology, to determine experimentally the effect of camber on an airfoil that stalls at the nose, and to compare the results with a simplified thin airfoil theory, which requires that flow conditions at the nose be similar. The nine percent thick models had cambers of zero, three, and six percent, and a fourth model with six percent camber had a rear slot at about 70 percent chord. Tests conducted at Reynolds Numbers of 640,000 and 840,000 showed that the addition of camber to a nose-stalling airfoil tended to make it a trailing-edge staller or partially so, but that by use of the slot, the stall was shifted back to the nose. Good agreement was obtained in the theoretical and experimental determination of maximum lift for the slotted airfoil, but not for the angle at which this occurred.

Thesis Files