Dynamic stall on a pitching and surging airfoil

Vertical axis wind turbine blades undergo dynamic stall due to the large angle of attack variation they experience during a turbine rotation. The flow over a single blade was modeled using a sinusoidally pitching and surging airfoil in a non-rotating frame with a constant freestream flow at a mean chord Reynolds number of \({10^5}\). Two-dimensional, time-resolved velocity fields were acquired using particle image velocimetry. Vorticity contours were used to visualize shear layer and vortex activity. A low-order model of dynamic stall was developed using dynamic mode decomposition, from which primary and secondary dynamic separation modes were identified. The interaction between these two modes was able to capture the physics of dynamic stall and as such can be extended to other turbine configurations and problems in unsteady aerodynamics. Results from the linear pitch/surge frame are extrapolated to the rotating VAWT frame to investigate the behavior of identified flow structures.