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.
