A Stereoscopic PIV Study of a Near-field Wingtip Vortex

An experimental study was conducted to investigate the wing-tip vortex generated from a rectangular NACA0012 airfoil model. A high-resolution Stereoscopic Particle Image Velocimetry (SPIV) system was used to conduct detailed flow field measurements to quantify the transient behavior of the wing-tip vortex in the near field. The characteristics of the vortex wandering phenomena, i.e., the slow side-to-side movement of the wing-tip vortex core, were revealed in great detail based on the SPIV measurement results.