On the Vortex Pair Quickly Formed by Some Aerofoils

Abstract

It was suggested by Lanchester some years ago that an aerofoil immersed in a moving fluid gave rise to two trailing vortices of opposite hand, one situated near each of the extremities of span. The existence of the vortex pair has since been demonstrated in a variety of ways, of which perhaps the most striking is that due to Caldwell and Fales, who used the condensation of water vapour in a high-speed wind channel to obtain photographs. The vortex pair constitutes so important a feature in the stream behind most aerofoils that measurements capable of numerical analysis seemed desirable, and an account is given in the present Paper of some work to this end which appears capable of straightforward interpretation.It may be that the residual motion sufficiently far behind any aerofoil is a vortex pair. Similar experiments to those about to be described, however, which deal with the motion only for a few chords back, have been made with several other aerofoils of a variety of shapes having long, graded wing tips, and with some of these no distinct vortex was found. With others apparently more than one pair could exist in certain circumstances, but opportunity has not occurred to probe deeply into these interesting cases. Attention is confined to two aerofoils representative of considerable variation in a class having uniform section and angle of incidence with blunt, or square-ended, wing tips. The general nature of the results is common even with aerofoils outside this class, but the foregoing remarks will serve to indicate that exceptions are known to exist.