Developing Tools for Assessing Bend-twist Coupled Foils

For many applications, the ability of a foil to passively adapt to the experienced fluid loading could be advantageous, Nicholls-Lee & Turnock (2007): e.g. wind or tidal turbine blades, hydrofoils for sailing yachts, or marine propellers. Composite materials provide the opportunity to tailor the bend twist coupling of a structure to achieve these goals, Veers & Bir (1998). To allow such foils to be designed and assessed, numerical tools such as finite element analysis (FEA) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) will need to be coupled together in fluid-structure interaction (FSI) simulations. Currently, there is a lack of experimental validation data for FSI investigations. This paper details experiments conducted on a flexible NACA0015 foil.