TEP 4160 Aerodynamics. Lab-exercise; Pressure distribution over the HOG airfoil.

INTRODUCTION
The department has developed an airfoil called the HOGairf oil, which is designed to produce a signicant amount of lift at a low angle of attack while at the same time producing very little drag. As you may see from the gure, this has led to a rather unusual geometry. The geometry was derived by forcing the boundary layer on the upper surface to be close to separation at the design angle of attack. Hence the surface friction is very low. Since the drag on an airfoil is mainly friction drag this gives a low drag coecient. The price to pay for this is that when stall occurs, the ow separates over most of the upper surface instantaneously. This happens roughly at 7 degrees angle of attack. For lower angles of attack the airfoil performs well. The model airfoil has been measured to have a best L/D ratio of about 127, while the numerical simulations indicate ratios up to about 150. The model that was made for the tests is rather large to allow good measurements in the large wind tunnel at the department. The model was tted with 86 pressure taps to allow the pressure distribution on the surface to be measured. 66 taps are located along the centre line of the wing while the rest are distributed at two other spanwise locations to allow the ow two-dimensionality to be monitored.
Trykkhullplassering
0.20 0.15 0.10 y/c 0.05 0.00 -0.05 -0.10 0.0 0.2 0.4 x/c 0.6 0.8 1.0

Figure 1: Location of pressure taps. Figure 1 shows the prole with the locations of the pressure taps shown as red dots.

MEASUREMENTS
The wing is mounted on 4 circular supports roughly in the middle of the tunnel. The rear supports are telescopic allowing the angle of attack to be adjusted. In front of the wing a Pitot tube may be found which can be used to measure the incoming velocity. The 66 pressure taps along the centre plane are connected to a pressure transducer through a mechanical scanner. The transducer is of the dierential type which means that is has an output which is linearly proportional to the dierence between the pressure one wishes to measure and a reference pressure. This may be the atmospheric pressure or some other pressure like the static pressure measured by the Pitot tube. The signal from the transducer is sent through an amplier unit to a PC where it is measured by a program called Genlog which estimates the time average of the signal. A suitable averaging time 1

may be 30 seconds pr. measurement point. The set-up is indicated in Figur 2. The scanner allows the pressure signal from one of the taps at a time to be led to the pressure transducer. By pressing the button labelled ST EP you may step forward, one tap at a time. But note that stepping backwards is not allowed, so if you are impatient and go too fast you will have to go through all the taps again to come back to the tap you wanted. If you step too far, use the HOM E button which fast forwards the scanner to channel 1 and then step to the required position. NB! This is a mechanical scanner which takes some time to advance. Dont be impatient. Then you only risk to bypass the channel you want! The pressure tubing is connected to the scanner in the same way as we specify the coordinates to the program Foil. That means the rst tube connected is located near the trailing edge on the lower side. The next tube is the one in front of this etc and we proceed forward and around the leading edge over the upper surface to the upper trailing edge. The rst tube is connected to channel 3 of the scanner for historic reasons. (Channel 1 and 2 are not used.) The controller uses two identical scanners with 48 taps each. The rst scanner uses channel 3 to 48, i.e. it scans the rst 46 pressure taps. When you have done channel 48 and step forward again the scanner returns to channel 1 (which is not used). You must then connect the other scanner to the pressure transducer and advance to channel 3 to start measurements of the remaining 20 taps (connected to channel 3 through to 22). We have made an Excel worksheet, called HOG-trykkplassering.xls, where the physical location of each tap may be found. Here you can also put in your measurements as you go. The program then converts your measurements to CP values and plots the results. The program also has the airfoil coordinates in a format ready to be used in the Foil program.

P0 Ps

Transducer Scanner + kontroller

Figure 2: The measurement set-up.

PC

THE EXERCISE
a) Adjustments and calibration
The rst thing to be done is to set the wing at the required angle of attack. Using an electronic level device and a template the wing should rst be set to = 00 . When the top of the template is horizontal the chord line is at zero degrees angle of attack. Next choose the angle of attack you want to use for the measurements somewhere between = 00 and 40 (in the linear operating range of the

airfoil) and adjust the wing to this angle. (Note! The wing is heavy so make sure someone is taking the weight of the wing as you release the two rear supports!) The next thing to do is to calibrate the pressure transducer. This is done by feeding a known pressure dierence to the transducer and measure the input to the PC. An easy way of doing this is to connect the transducer to a Pitot tube. If you simultaneously can read the pressure dierence on a manometer, the pressure can be calculated. Set the manometer scale to the 1:5 inclination and set the alcohol column ( = 800kg/m3 ) to zero. Make a recording of the transducer voltage with the program Genlog at zero pressure dierence. Next, start the tunnel and run the speed up to e.g. N = 800. Make another reading at this speed using Genlog. Increase the tunnel speed once more to e.g. N = 1200 and repeat the measurement. The transducer has a linear response, P = Pref + K(E Eref ). This can be veried if you enter your data into the excel le. Compute the transducer sensitivity, K. K ought to be about K 60P a/V olt divided by the amplier gain you used.

b) MEASUREMENTS
The measurements should be made with a reference velocity of about Uref = 10 to 14 m/s. Connect the Pitot tube stagnation pressure to the transducer. Measure the voltage without any tunnel speed and record this reading (Eatm ). Make an estimate of the transducer output at the required operating speed. Start the tunnel and adjust the speed until you get the estimated voltage. You are then ready to start the measurements. Measure the transducer output from the Pitot (E(P0 )) and check if the velocity is as planned. Now disconnect the total pressure tube from the transducer and connect the output from the rst scanner to the transducer. Step to channel 3 and make a recording of the static pressure from the rst tap on the wing, (E(P3 )). Step to channel 4 and wait for about 5 seconds for the pressure to stabilise. Then make a measurement of this pressure, (E4 ). Repeat until you have done all 48 channels on the rst scanner. Replace the output tube from the rst scanner with the output from the second transducer. Step forwards to channel 3 and repeat the measurements until you have done channel 22. You have now nished the measurements. Turn the tunnel speed down to zero and turn o the power.

c) DATA ANALYSIS
The measurements should be presented as curves of the pressure coecients. If you start thinking about this, you will realise that CP can be derived directly from the voltages without any prior knowledge of the transducer calibration constant. The coecient may be written as Cp = (Ei Eref ) Pi Pref = 1 2 (E(P0 ) Eref ) 2 Uref (1)

POSTPROCESSING:
Plot the pressure coecients and compute the lift coecient CL from the measured Cp distribution. Run F oil for the same angle of attack. Plot the pressure distribution and compare with your measurements. Discuss possible reasons for any dierences between the measurements and calculations.

Write a short report where you show the plots and give a discussion of the results. The report should be handed in within one week of the exercise.