A parabolized stability analysis of a trailing vortex wake

To aid in understanding how best to control a trailing vortex, we perform a parabolized stability analysis on a flow past a wing at a chord-based Reynolds number of 1000. At the upstream position, the wake instability branch dominates, with only a single vortex instability present in the spectrum. With downstream progression, the growth rate of the wake instability decays, but remains unstable 10 chords downstream. With the wake mode being unstable so far downstream, these results imply that the excitation of the wake instability, despite the varying base flow, will continue to see growth and potentially disrupt the trailing vortex. Conversely, the vortex instability in its formative region rapidly decays to the stable half-plane, then at 11 chords downstream becomes unstable again. We hypothesized the renewed instability growth far downstream is developing as a result of vortex instabilities, however the excitation of these instabilities proves to be challenging in the vortex far field. From these results, control near the two-dimensional wake behind the airfoil may better interfere with the trailing vortex formation; however, to determine the optimal disturbances, an adjoint analysis is required and is included in the future work of the project.