An Experimental Flow Study of the Pitching Oscillating Airfoil Using the PIV Technique

A wind tunnel experiment is carried out employing 2D-PIV technique to visualize the qualitative flow field and to obtain the quantitative velocity profile respectively in the wake of 1 Hz pitching oscillating airfoil of 6 degrees amplitude. In order to validate the experiment for future’s study, the experimental velocity data are compared to relative CFD ones. The CFD results are obtained from a code called Map Flow that is able to deal with the flow around pitching and plunging oscillating airfoil. From the vortices maps it is shown that the experimental results and CFD ones are well compared with respect to the size and the shape of the vortices patterns. Quantitatively, the differences between experiment and CFD with respect to the velocity profile are acceptable.