Boundary Layer Control of Airfoil using Rotating Cylinder

Abstract

The requirement for improving the aerodynamic efficiency and delaying the formation of stall over the wing has been of prime importance within the field of aviation. The main objective of the project is to further improve upon these two parameters. The configuration used for analysis consists of a NACA 2412 airfoil of chord length 0.982m with a 64mm cylinder at the leading edge. Analysis is completed using ANSYS Fluent, with a freestream velocity of 10m/s. The aerodynamic characteristics of three configuration bare airfoil, Airfoil with static cylinder and Airfoil with rotating cylinder are tabulated and plotted. The comparison is then followed by pressure and velocity contours to visualize the flow over each configuration. The rotating cylinder configuration shows a improvement in the aerodynamics characteristics. The rotating cylinder configuration gives the most favourable result. This study has a potential application in high lift devices and can be used as stall delaying device.