Numerical Simulations of Nonlinear Post-Critical Vibrations of an Airfoil After Flutter Instability

The contribution deals with the numerical simulation of the flutter of an airfoil with three degrees of freedom (3-DOF) for rotation around an elastic axis, oscillation in the vertical direction and rotation of a flap. The finite element (FE) solution of two-dimensional (2-D) incompressible Navier-Stokes equations is coupled with a system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations describing the airfoil vibrations with large amplitudes taking into account the nonlinear mass matrix. The time-dependent computational domain and a moving grid are treated by the Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) method and a suitable stabilization of the FE discretization is applied. The developed method was successfully tested by the classical flutter computation of the critical flutter velocity using NASTRAN program considering the linear model of vibrations and the double-lattice aerodynamic theory. The method was applied to the numerical simulations of the post flutter regime in time domain showing Limit Cycle Oscillations (LCO) due to nonlinearities of the flow model and vibrations with large amplitudes. Numerical experiments were performed for the airfoil NACA 0012 respecting the effect of the air space between the flap and the main airfoil.