Flow past an airfoil at an angle of attack to an oncoming sonic stream

Abstract

Guderley [1] proposed a theoretical example of sonic flow of gas past a symmetric airfoil at zero angle of attack to an oncoming stream. The linear distribution of the velocity over the airfoil surface was found from the solution describing this flow. It is of interest to generalize this example to the case of nonsymmetric sonic flow past an airfoil. In the present paper a study is made of sonic flow past a Guderley airfoil at an angle of attack and a study is made of the dependence of the velocity over the surface of the airfoil on the angle of attack. This dependence is obtained by means of the parabolic method of Spreiter and Alksne [2], which makes it possible to solve this problem directly in the plane of the flow. For comparison, flow past a parabolic airfoil at an angle of attack is considered, and an expression is obtained for the dependence of the distribution of the velocity over the surface on the angle of attack, this being a generalization of the formula of Zierep [3], who considered sonic flow past a parabolic airfoil at zero angle of attack.