Simulation of the aeroelastic behavior of a possibly detached flow airfoil by a discrete vortex method

International audience; The aeroelastic behavior of an airfoil results in a complex coupling between the elastic response of the structure and the dynamics of the flow. It can lead to the failure of a lifting surface which consequences could be catastrophic. Experiments and high-order computations contribute to the understanding of this phenomenon, but fast low-order methods are needed for engineering tasks. In the present work, we implement a loose fluid-structure coupling between a discrete-time vortex method, using a leading edge shedding criterion, and the structure motion equations. For each time step, the aerodynamic coefficients are first calculated before the computation of the motion of the structure. Flutter velocity is obtained with the same precision as unsteady standard method. The advantage of the method proposed is the ability to catch the limit cycle for velocities larger than flutter speed due to dynamic stall of the airfoil.