Effect of acceleration on dynamic stall of airfoil in unsteady operating conditions

In this paper the effect of accelerated flow over a moving airfoil is considered and based on the flow field around the airfoil the dynamic stall is evaluated. In contrast to ordinary pitching motion, the dynamic stall evaluation in this study is performed with a different motion pattern, in which the airfoil has a heaving motion in one direction. This motion pattern is also similar to rotation of an element of blade in horizontal axis wind turbines (HAWTs). In present investigation, the Reynolds number is changed during simulation time and variations of this parameter from initial to final values are shown by acceleration parameter. The operating Reynolds number is more than 10⁶, and a S809 airfoil is selected to move with accelerations of 1, 4 and 6 m/s² in normal direction to free stream. To resolve accelerated flow filed in the two‐dimensional computational domain and to achieve results within a reasonable computation time, the unsteady Reynolds‐Averaged Navier–Stokes (URANS) equations are employed. The governing equations are discretized based on the finite volume approach and semi‐implicit method for pressure linked equations algorithm is used for pressure–velocity coupling. Furthermore, turbulence effect on flow field is accounted using shear stress transport (SST) k‐ω model. It is shown that the accelerated flow can significantly influence on the aerodynamic loads and dynamic stall trend. This study may introduce a new concept regarding dynamic stall and aerodynamic loads when the rotational acceleration is involved in HAWTs. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.