The aerodynamics of a thin airfoil of arbitrary camber having a porous trailing edge in steady, subsonic, compressible potential flow is investigated. In the special case of a flat plate airfoil with a porous trailing edge, an exact, closed form solution is obtained using complex variable theory. The pressure loading on the airfoil, the lift and pitching moments are exhibited explicitly along with typical numerical results. The corresponding situation in supersonic flow is also considered.

Base cavities (hollow extensions mounted behind the rear end of a bluff body) are known to reduce substantially the aerodynamic drag of two-dimensional bodies. For axisymmetric bodies their effect is not well established, and the objective of this work was to assess their drag-reducing potential. Experiments were performed using three different types of base cavities, one solid walled and two ventilated, each with six different depths ranging from 0.1 to 0.9 body diameters. All three types of cavities reduced the body drag for small cavity depths, with a maximum drag coefficient reduction of 0.027 being obtained with a ventilated cavity 0.2 diameters deep. The reductions are an order of magnitude lower than those reported for two-dimensional bodies, but are achieved with a much shorter cavity depth. Although the ventilated cavities had a beneficial effect for small depths, at large depths (greater than 0.5 diameters) they had an opposite effect – a very large drag increase. The cause of this increase is as yet not understood. Hot-wire investigation revealed that base cavities suppress wake periodicity. For cavities of small depth this correlated with a reduction in drag, but for large cavity depths the trends of the intensity of the periodic motion and of drag were not always the same.

In Part 1 expressions are derived for the coupled torsional, extensional and flexural stiffnesses of a fibre composite tube, such as a helicopter blade, which is subjected to torsion, longitudinal tension, chordwise and flapping bending moments and shear. The theory is an extension of Batho-Bredt engineering analysis and is valid for a cylindrical tube of arbitrary cross-section with an arbitrary circumferential distribution of fibre composite plies. Particular attention is paid to the coupling effects in which an asymmetric fibre lay-up results in a twisting of the tube under bending and/or tension. Consideration is also given to the influence on the stiffness characteristics of an initial twist in the tube.

In Part 2 the analysis of Part 1 is developed numerically for tubes representative of GFRP blades. Static and dynamic aspects are considered which pave the way for aeroelastic tailoring studies of such blades.