Low order modelling of lift forces for unsteady pitching and surging wings

This article describes a simple low-order model for the lift produced by rapidly accelerating and pitching flat plate wings. The model is informed by experiments performed as part of NATO’s AVT-202 technical team. The overall agreement of the model with the forces measured as part of this effort is reasonable, however, the main value of the model is to identify a number of contributions to the lift force and classifying these as either circulatory or non-circulatory. Thus the relative effects of viscosity and kinematic accelerations are identified which helps the understanding of unsteady low-Re flows