The unsteady Kutta condition is discussed in the light of some recent experimental measurements made near the trailing edge of a long flat plate and a 10C4 airfoil. The hierachy of disagreement from the theoretically predicted zero trailing edge loading caused by viscous instabilities is found to be acoustically correlated vortex shedding, natural vortex shedding, Tollmien-Schlichting waves, and, by implication, turbulent boundary-layer eddies. The region of significant chordwise disagreement scales with the wake perturbation wavelength of the corresponding instability. Coordinating the vorticity of the turbulent boundary layer shed from the profile airfoil with a transverse acoustic resonance produced a distinct disagreement of the Kutta condition at high reduced frequency parameters ( = wc/U). In this case and for vortex shedding, the extrapolated loading coefficient at the trailing edge increased with the nondimensional acoustic amplitude. I. Introduction T^HE Kutta condition as applied in unsteady JL potential airfoil analyses is essentially an extension of steady theory. Kutta ! postulated that a value of circulation should be chosen in his steady potential model to avoid a velocity singularity at the sharp trailing edge of an airfoil. This condition can be established if the trailing edge is also the rear stagnation point. The resulting modeled flow pattern agrees with that observed in steady flow and also predicts the lift and its chordwise distribution well at low angles of attack. The theoretical consequences of this hypothesis are that the lift loading or chordwise vorticity jump approaches zero at the trailing edge. An alternative statement is that the surface velocities on either side of the airfoil approach a common value at the rear stagnation point. For rounded trailing edges, the position of the rear stagnation point is indeterminate , as there is no velocity singularity to be avoided and so fix its location. In this case and for the situation of real flows with viscosity, Taylor2 proposed the condition of zero net vorticity discharge to establish the steady lift value. Preston3 explained the deviation of the lift of an airfoil at low angles of incidence from the potential theory value as due to the profile alteration from the boundary-layer growth. His calculations incorporated Taylor's vorticity discharge condition. Various approximate steady lift calculation methods for the rounded trailing edge geometry have been proposed by Gostello 4 and others. These extend the upper and lower lift distributions, at a selected chordwise position, to the trailing edge to give zero loading and thereby remove the stagnation point indeterminacy. In the unsteady case there are all the previous theoretical difficulties and, in addition, the unsteady effects on the viscous boundary layer and the shed vorticity. The latter complicates the airfoil response, making it a function of the airfoil's vorticity history. However, same theoretical assumption for the Kutta condition, of no unsteady loading at the
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Jan 1, 1997
Jean-Paul Dussauge 
Open Access