Investigation of limit cycle oscillations for a wing section with nonlinear stiffness

A wind tunnel experiment is designed with the objective to obtain well-behaved limit cycle oscillations for a wing section with two degrees of freedom, translation and rotation, in two-dimensional flow. This is accomplished using a setup of linear springs so that the resulting moment is a nonlinear function of the rotation angle. The experimental setup is designed so that the amplitudes of the limit cycle oscillations are sufficiently low to motivate the use of linear aerodynamics in the analysis. The experimental results are compared to analyses for two different configurations, and the agreement is fairly good.