The active Gurney flap technology is investigated to improve the performance of rotorblades by allowing helicopter blades to further control the lift unbalance that rises at high speed and by damping vibration loads on the rotor hub. This technology needs validation by wind tunnel testing of a scaled model blade under rotational loading. An optimised geometry of a flexible actuation system has ...

Numerous experiments have been conducted on plunging Eppler 361 airfoil in a subsonic wind tunnel. The experimental tests involved measuring the surface pressure distribution over the airfoil at Re=1.5×105. The airfoil was equipped with Gurney flap(heights of 2.6, 3.3 and 5% chord) and plunged at 6cm amplitude. The unsteady aerodynamic loads were calculated from the surface pressure measurement...

Miniflaps at the trailing edges of airfoils (e.g., Gurney flaps or divergent trailing edges) change the Kutta condition and thus produce higher lift. Unfortunately, however, the drag is also increased due to the flow separation downstream of this particular type of trailing edge. Therefore, the trade-off between beneficial and detrimental effects is considered in this paper. Various aspects of ...

The problem investigated in this experiment was which height of Gurney Flap gives the best lift improvement on an airfoil without increasing drag. The Gurney Flaps' heights are determined as a percentage of the airfoil's chord length. The hypothesis is that a Gurney Flap will produce the best lift to drag ratio when its height is two percent of the airfoil's chord length. The hypothesis was tes...

Wind tunnel tests were performed on an aerofoil section comparable to that of a full scale helicopter blade section with an upstream active Gurney flap in the framework of the European project CleanSky ITD Green RotorCraft. A modified NACA0012 profile was used, with 23 Kulite pressure transducers embedded in the profile’s surface and with an integrated actuator system for the Gurney flap. The G...

Following a comparative study on shape morphing and adaptive systems to improve rotorcraft efficiency, the Green Rotorcraft consortium has selected the Gurney flap technology as demonstrator of a smart adaptive rotorblade within the Clean Sky Joint Technology Initiative [1]. The aim of such a system is to actively increase helicopter overall performance by improving lift and alleviating static ...

Miniflaps at the trailing edge of airfoils (i.e., Gurney flaps) change the Kutta condition and thus produce higher lift. Unfortunately, however, the drag also increases due to the flow separation downstream of such modified trailing edges. The present work describes investigations aimed at the stabilization of the wake flow in order to achieve drag reduction and a decrease of sound generation. ...

The purpose of this paper is to characterize and estimate the recirculating length behind an aerodynamic profile in ground effect with Gurney Flap. flow characterization at high Reynolds numbers was performed by means numerical analysis. A correlation between size recirculation frequency vortex shedding studied. has a characteristic frequency, which, work, correlated defined authors. investigat...