Flow Field Study of Bio-Inspired Corrugated Airfoils at Low Reynolds Number with Different Peak Shapes

Abstract

This study is intended to understand the fluid flow behaviour of a bio inspired corrugated wing obtained from the mid span of the dragonfly wing with different peak shapes of the corrugations. The aerodynamic effect due to variation of the shape of the first peak is studied with triangular and a curved peak shapes. The coordinates of the corrugated wing of the dragonfly were obtained from the existing literature and scaled up 1:50 to do the computational work on it. The corrugated wing was modeled by using a modeling software, the meshing was done by using ICEMCFD with a rectangular block meshing and simulated in Ansys Fluent software at 35000 Reynolds number and angles of attack ranging from 4° to 12°. The k-ε turbulence modeling was deployed to capture turbulence in the tested domain. The boundary conditions and size of the domain were selected as per available experimental wind tunnel setup. The flow characteristics like pressure and velocity of the triangular and curved peaks were obtained computationally and compared with each other having same geometrical parameters. The simulated results showed that the curved peak performed aerodynamically better than the triangular peak. The leading edge vortices were observed in both models trapped in the trough of the first valley with some different intensity. The validation of the computational flow results was done by existing experimental flow visualization in a wind tunnel and both results agree with each other.