Experimental and numerical study on dynamic stall under a large Reynolds number

Dynamic stall under large Reynolds numbers and large reduced frequencies has a significant effect on the performance of the wind turbine blades, helicopter rotors, etc. So the dynamic stall physics of the NACA0012 airfoil under a large Reynolds number of Re = 1.5 × 10⁶ was studied using experimental and numerical methods. The reduced frequency range was k = 0.035 – 0.1. The unsteady flow field in dynamic stall was studied in detail by using the transient pressure measurement and the numerical simulation based on the unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) equation. And the time-frequency characteristics of the dynamic stall were studied using the wavelet analysis. The study showed that the aerodynamic performance during the dynamic stall was dominated by the shear layer vortex (SLV) and the leading edge vortex (LEV), and the phase difference between the SLV and the LEV was the key factor in the existence of the bimodal characteristics of the aerodynamic force/moment. There was a significant linear correlation between the negative peak of the vortex-induced C_p and the C_n in the reduced frequency range studied in this paper. During the convection of the near-wall LEV to the trailing edge, the high-frequency features firstly decay, and the multi-scale structures of the LEV become more significant as the reduced frequency gradually increases.