Experimental Investigation of the Flow in a Stalling Engine Inlet

A flow-through nacelle was investigated at the Institute of Fluid Mechanics and Aerodynamics at the Universitat der Bundeswehr in Munich. The boundary layer loading of the nacelle resembles that of a powered engine at take-off conditions and high mass flow rates. The aim of the project is to generate an experimental validation database in order to develop a physically based numerical code to calculate the flow at the edge of the flight envelope. The investigations concentrated on the flow under an inhomogeneous onstream. Therefore, a vortex generator was positioned 1.74 m in front of the nacelle’s leading edge. This vortex generator is a motor driven airfoil, which pitches from angles of attack of αvg = -11° to αvg = 11° within approximately 60 ms.