SHAPE OPTIMIZATION OF GURNEY FLAP ON AIRFOIL

Abstract

Gurney Flap is known as a special type of high lift device that can help to change the performance output of an airfoil very beautifully. The first and foremost advantage of using Gurney Flaps is that these flaps are used so that most importantly lift force can be increased along with a moderate decrease of drag force under certain lift conditions for a given lift coefficient. Initially Gurney Flap was applied only to Automobiles, especially in race cars. Recently this flap is being tried to be applied to airfoils, wind turbines, rotorcrafts too, which is in research process. Gurney Flaps have been widely studied and applied in airfoil dynamic as well as static stall control, ground effects, flutter control, flapping airfoil control and rotor blade load control. Many researches from different countries have been conducted on the mechanisms of Gurney flaps using numerical simulations and wind tunnel tests. Our main concern of this thesis is to observe and understand the effect of this Gurney flap on airfoil and analyze its effectiveness. Overall 65-70 research papers have been scrutinized for our research to understand the basic concept of this flap and its applications. Different angles of Gurney flap with the chord have been experimented in this research to determine its effect on airfoils Lift, Drag, Pitching moment for both laminar and turbulent flow. Experimental approach using Wind tunnel have been followed for subsonic flows in this case.