The dynamics and timescales of static stall

Airfoil stall plays a central role in the design of safe and efficient lifting surfaces. We typically distinguish between static and dynamic stall based on the unsteady rate of change of an airfoil’s angle of attack. Despite the somewhat misleading denotation, the force and flow development of an airfoil undergoing static stall are highly unsteady and the boundary with dynamic stall is not clearly defined. We experimentally investigate the forces acting on a two-dimensional airfoil that is subjected to two manoeuvres leading to static stall: a slow continuous increase in angle of attack with a reduced pitch rate of 1.3 10−4 and a step-wise increase in angle of attack from 14.2°to 14.8°within 0.04 convective times. We systematically quantify the stall reaction delay, or the timespan between the moment the blade exceeds its critical static stall angle and the onset of stall, for many repetitions of these two manoeuvres. The onset of flow stall is marked by the distinct drop in the lift coefficient. The reaction delay for the slow continuous ramp-up manoeuvre is not influenced by the blade kinematics and its occurrence histogram is normally distributed around 32 convective times. The static reaction delay is compared with dynamic stall delays for dynamic ramp-up motions with reduced pitch rates ranging from 9 10−4 to 0.14 and for dynamic sinusoidal pitching motions of different airfoils at higher Reynolds numbers up to 1 106. The stall delays for all conditions follow the same power law decrease from 32 convective times for the most steady case down to an asymptotic value of 3 convective times for reduced pitch rates above 0.04. Static stall is not phenomenologically different than dynamic stall and is merely a typical case of stall for low pitch rates where the onset of flow separation is not promoted by the blade kinematics. Based on our results, we suggest that conventional measurements of the static stall angle and the static load curves should be conducted using a continuous and uniform ramp-up motion at a reduced frequency around 1 10−4.