Individual influence of pitching and plunging motions on flow structures over an airfoil during dynamic stall

The individual influence of pitching and plunging motions on flow structures is studied experimentally by changing the phase lag between the geometrical angle of attack and the plunging angle of attack. Five phase lags are chosen as the experimental parameters, while the Strouhal number, the reduced frequency and the Reynolds number are fixed. During the motion of the airfoil, the leading edge vortex, the reattached vortex and the secondary vortex are observed in the flow field. The leading edge vortex is found to be the main flow structure through the proper orthogonal decomposition. The increase of phase lag results in the increase of the leading edge velocity, which strongly influences the leading edge shear layer and the leading edge vortex. The plunging motion contributes to the development of the leading edge shear layer, while the pitching motion is the key reason for instability of the leading edge shear layer. It is also found that a certain increase of phase lag, around 34.15° in this research, can increase the airfoil lift.