PIV measurements of the near-wake flow of an airfoil above a free surface

The near-wake flow of a NACA0012 airfoils mounted above a water surface were experimentally studied in a wind/wave tunnel. The main objective of this study is to investigate the influence of the free surface on the structure of the airfoil trailing wake. The flow structure was measured with different ride heights between the airfoil and free surface using a Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) system. The Reynolds number based on the chord length of the airfoil was about 3.5×103. For each experimental condition, large amount of instantaneous velocity fields were captured and ensemble-averaged to get the spatial distributions of mean velocity and mean vorticity, as well as turbulence statistics. The results show that the flow structures of the airfoil wake varies remarkably with the change in the ride height.