Effects of Flow Control Devices on an Airfoil

Abstract

A set of active flow control methods on controlling flow separation and drag reduction over a NACA0015 airfoil were numerically studied by solving three-dimensional incompressible unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations. Four achievements have been made: (1) Through the comparison of several turbulence models, DES k-epsilon model was adopted since it can well capture the unsteady separation around the airfoil. (2) The numerical results of a NACA0015 airfoil without/with the blowing/suction and pulsed jets as flow control devices have been proved to be very consistent with the experimental results. (3) The trends of Reynolds stresses were analyzed to reveal the flow-control mechanism over airfoil under various active flow control devices. (4) A fluidic mechanism for pulsed jets and blowing/suction devices can significantly improve the control performance, and optimization could be conducted to obtain better results in the future.