The Importance of the Unsteady Kutta Condition when Modelling Gust-Aerofoil Interaction

Abstract

The Kutta condition is applied to aerofoils with sharp trailing edges to allow for viscous effects to be considered within a simplified system of equations that are inviscid. This paper discusses in detail the inclusion of an unsteady Kutta condition at a sharp trailing edge during gust-aerofoil interaction, and illustrates how the analytic solution for the far-field noise generated by this interaction changes if the unsteady Kutta condition is neglected, or more precisely, if the unsteady pressure is permitted to be singular at the trailing edge. The analytic solution, both with and without the unsteady Kutta condition, is compared with numerical results that have no imposed unsteady Kutta condition. Importantly the results agree well only when the unsteady Kutta condition is neglected in the analytic solution. This paper highlights where the far-field acoustics are most affected by neglecting the unsteady Kutta condition for a variety of singularities that can occur in the unsteady pressure at the trailing edge, and shows that results permitting different behaviour in the unsteady surface pressure at the trailing edge could give significantly different far-field noise predictions, even though the surface pressure elsewhere along the aerofoil surface agrees with benchmark solutions.