Characteristics of gusts with different velocity profiles and control parameters

The characteristics of gust flow are essential for gust response and alleviation. To investigate the influence of control parameters on gusts with different velocity profiles, four vertical gust profiles were designed. Methods were proposed to generate them with two pitching airfoils in a low-speed water tunnel. The velocity field was measured via phase-locked particle image velocimetry. The coefficient of determination R2 was proposed to evaluate the generated gust profile quality, which referred to the quality of the vertical velocity profile. The influence of control parameters on different gust profiles was investigated, and the cause of the profile distortion was explored. For continuous sine gusts, the gust ratio GR increased approximately linearly with the pitching amplitude, while the gust ratio initially increased and then decreased with increasing frequency. As the two control parameters increased, the flow uniformity decreased because the airfoil wakes disturbed the measured flow field. In terms of continuous 1-cosine gusts, the gust ratio increased nonlinearly with pitching amplitude. Compared with those of the sine gusts, the GR values of the 1-cosine gusts were higher, whereas the R2 values were lower. In addition, the discrete and continuous gust profiles had similar distortion near the peaks. However, discrete gusts had lower R2 values than continuous gusts because the starting and stopping vortices of the pitching airfoils disturbed the gust flow. Based on these findings, a method to improve the profile quality and field uniformity by increasing the spacing of the pitching airfoils was proposed. This work can support further studies of gust response and alleviation during complex gust encounters.