Book Description

Stall and its consequences are fundamentally important to the design and operation of flight vehicles. A certain degree of unsteadiness always accompanies the flow over an airfoil or other streamlined body at high angle of attack, but the stall of a lifting surface undergoing unsteady motion is even more complex than static stall. Dynamic stall remains a major unsolved problem with a variety of current applications in aeronautics, hydrodynamics, and wind engineering. This report summarizes the main physical features of the phenomenon and the attempts that have been made to predict it. The information presented is drawn mainly from recent review articles and investigations by the author and his colleagues. Since a large fraction of the existing knowledge has come from experimental research, the details of dynamic stall are discussed principally in physical terms.