Benefits of Applying Pulsed Jet Actuation on a Vertical Stabilizer

Abstract

With active flow control (AFC) it is possible to increase the control authority of a Vertical Tail Plane (VTP), which could lead to smaller stabilizers on future airplanes. While this hypothesis is the main reason for research on active flow control on stabilizers, with higher control authority of the VTP, the required sideslip or rudder deflection angles for certain flight scenarios could be reduced. In the current experiment, Pulsed Jet Actuation (PJA) was applied on a VTP wind-tunnel model and a wide range of sideslip, rudder deflection angles, and momentum coefficients was investigated. The measured data indicates that pulsed blowing with \(C_{\mu }=1.5\)% at the rudder is capable of reducing the required sideslip angle by \(\varDelta \beta \approx 55\)% when the rudder deflection angle is constant. If the sideslip angle is kept constant the required rudder deflection angle can be reduced by \(\varDelta \delta _r\approx 40\)%.