Abstract
Inclusion of Active Flow Control (AFC) into Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations is usually highly time-consuming and requires extensive computational resources and effort. In principle, the flow inside of the fluidic AFC actuators should be incorporated into the problem under consideration. However, for many applications, the internal actuator flow is not crucial, and only its effect on the outer flow needs to be resolved. In this study, the unsteady periodic flow inside the Suction and Oscillatory Blowing (SaOB) actuator is analyzed, using two CFD methods of ranging complexity (URANS and hybrid RANS-LES). The results are used for the definition and development of the simplified surface boundary condition for simulating the SaOB flow at the actuator’s exit. The developed boundary condition is verified and validated, in the case of a low-speed airfoil with suction applied on the upper (suction) side of the airfoil and oscillatory blowing applied on the lower (pressure) side, close to the trailing edge—a fluidic Gurney flap. Its effect on the circulation is analyzed and compared to the experimental data.
Highlights
Active Flow Control (AFC) is considered to be a useful technique in enhancing the performance of existing designs
A second, and in some sense complementary, issue is the growth of the problem size in terms of the number of grid points, which leads to increased wall-time and Central Processing Unit (CPU) resources needed to solve the problem
Comparison between URANS with the k–ω model and the hybrid RANS-Large Eddy Simulation (LES), model represented by the SST-DDES simulation, brings more confidence in the computational results
Summary
Active Flow Control (AFC) is considered to be a useful technique in enhancing the performance of existing designs. A second, and in some sense complementary, issue is the growth of the problem size in terms of the number of grid points, which leads to increased wall-time and Central Processing Unit (CPU) resources needed to solve the problem. This is even more significant in the case of actuator arrays, where even the effort to simulate the AFC internal flows exceeds the typical size of the corresponding problem without AFC. The flow is usually inherently unsteady by nature, especially in the case of pulsed or oscillatory blowing, which requires time-consuming and unsteady calculations, as well as a statistical evaluation of the results
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