Separation and flow unsteadiness control in a compression corner induced interaction using mechanical vortex generators: Effects of vane size and inter-device spacing

Abstract

An experimental investigation was conducted to control separation characteristics of a 24° compression corner induced interaction in a Mach 2.0 flow using an array of mechanical vortex generators (VGs) with rectangular vanes (RRV) placed 6.8δ upstream of the interaction. The objective was to study the effect of (i) inter-VG spacing (s/h = 12, 9.5, 8.0, 6.1, 5.7, 5.5, 4.9, and 4.7), (ii) vane chord length (c/h = 7.2, 4.2, and 3.0), and (iii) vane angle (α = 24°, 20°, 18°, and 16°) in controlling the interaction and on the surface flow topology. These modifications reduce the projected area of VGs in the array from the conventional VG design of RRV2 (c/h = 7.2 and s/h = 9.5) to RRV8 (c/h = 3.0 and s/h = 4.7) by 41%. Reducing s/h also reduces the inter-VG region of the separation significantly that helps to achieve maximum reduction in the streamwise extent of separation up to 83% and in the peak rms value up to 80%. The former improves the overall pressure recovery from 3.0 to 3.4, thereby moving closer toward the inviscid value of 3.8. Surface flow topology shows that the VG array splits a single large spanwise separation bubble for no control into multiple smaller scale individual separation cells placed side-by-side all along the span of the interaction. This helps to reduce the magnitude of mass exchange imbalance across each individual separation cell and, hence, stabilizes the overall interaction relative to no control. The best VG configuration of RRV8 shifts the dominant frequency of fluctuations to approximately 2 kHz or St = 0.19, which is nearly an order of magnitude higher than that for no control.