Causal mechanism behind the stall delay by airfoil’s pitching-up motion

Abstract Why the stall of an airfoil can be significantly delayed by its pitching-up motion? Various attempts have been proposed to answer this question over the past half century, but none is satisfactory. In this letter we prove that a chain of vorticity-dynamics processes at accelerating boundary is fully responsible for the causal mechanism underlying this peculiar phenomenon. The local flow behavior is explained by a simple potential-flow model.

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