Mechanism of airfoil stall flutter: New insights from global linear stability analysis

Stall flutter is a self-excited aeroelastic vibration phenomenon that occurs in lifting systems near the stall angle of attack, characterized by the distinct single-degree-of-freedom behavior. Despite its significance, this phenomenon remains not fully understood and is often vaguely attributed to nonlinear effects. To address this gap, the present study aims to reveal the underlying fluid–structure interaction mechanisms of stall flutter through global linear stability analysis (LSA). For this purpose, a reduced-order model (ROM)-based aeroelastic stability analysis framework is established using the autoregressive with exogenous input method. The ROM-based aeroelastic model provides a low-order representation of the coupled dynamics near the equilibrium steady state and can accurately capture the stability characteristics of the fluid-elastic system. It is found that as the angle of attack approaches the static stall angle, a low-frequency weakly stable fluid mode emerges, whose frequency is sufficiently lower than that of the von Kármán vortex shedding. The interaction between this fluid mode and the structure mode ultimately leads to the instability of the aeroelastic system at high reduced velocities, which is the fundamental cause of stall flutter. Moreover, dynamic mode decomposition is employed to successfully extract the spatial coherent structures and frequency characteristics of this low-frequency fluid mode, thereby confirming the validity of the LSA results. Further analysis indicates that, as the angle of attack decreases, this low-frequency fluid mode gradually weakens and eventually degenerates into more stable non-oscillatory fluid modes, resulting in structural stabilization and the cessation of stall flutter. Overall, the linear dynamic model accurately predicts the onset of instability and the vibration frequency of the airfoil, which challenges the traditional nonlinear perspectives and supports the feasibility of using linear control theory for stall flutter suppression in future research.