On the steady separated flow around an inclined flat plate

Abstract

An inviscid analytic model is proposed for the steady separated flow around an inclined flat plate. With the plate normal to the stream, the model reduces to the wake-source model of Parkinson & Jandali originally developed for flow external to a symmetrical two-dimensional bluff body and its wake. At any other inclination, the Kutta condition is satisfied at both leading and trailing edges of the plate, and, in the limit that the angle of attack approaches zero, classical airfoil theory is recovered. A boundary condition is formulated based on some experimental results of Abernathy, but no additional empirical information is required. The predicted pressure distributions on the wetted surface for a wide range of angle attack are found to be in good agreement with experimental data, especially at smaller angles of attack. An extension to include a leading-edge separation bubble is explored and results are satisfactory.