Assessment of Control Volume Estimation of Thrust for a Sinusoidally Pitching Airfoil at Low Reynolds Number

The proper estimation of thrust is very important for understanding the aerodynamics of oscillating airfoils at low chord Reynolds number Re. Although direct force measurement is possible, force values at low Re are often small, and separation of the test-model’s inertia forces from the data may not be straightforward. A common alternative is a control-volume (CV) approach, where terms in the integral momentum equation are computed from measured wake velocity profiles. Although it is acceptable to use only the mean streamwise-velocity profile in estimating the streamwise force on stationary airfoils, recent work has highlighted the importance of terms relating the velocity fluctuation and pressure distribution in the wake for unsteady airfoils. The goal of the present work is to capitalize on 2D computational data for a harmonically pitching airfoil at Re in the range 2,000-22,000, where all terms in the momentum-integral equation are accessible, to evaluate the importance of the various terms in the equation and assess the accuracy of the assumptions that are typically made in experiments due to the difficulty in measuring certain terms (such as the wake pressure distribution) by comparing the CV results with the actual computed thrust.