Effects of single synthetic jet on turbulent boundary layer

Abstract

The turbulent boundary layer (TBL) is actively controlled by the synthetic jet generated from a circular hole. According to the datasets of velocity fields acquired by a time-resolved particle image velocimetry (TR-PIV) system, the average drag reduction rate of 6.2% in the downstream direction of the hole is obtained with control. The results of phase averaging show that the synthetic jet generates one vortex pair each period and the consequent vortex evolves into hairpin vortex in the environment with free-stream, while the reverse vortex decays rapidly. From the statistical average, it can be found that a low-speed streak is generated downstream. Induced by the two vortex legs, the fluid under them converges to the middle. The drag reduction effect produced by the synthetic jet is local, and it reaches a maximum value at x + = 400, where the drag reduction rate reaches about 12.2%. After the extraction of coherent structure from the spatial two-point correlation analysis, it can be seen that the synthetic jet suppresses the streamwise scale and wall–normal scale of the large scale coherent structure, and slightly weakens the spanwise motion to achieve the effect of drag reduction.