Abstract
A flow control technique by local vibration is proposed to improve the aerodynamic performance of a typical airfoil NACA 0012. Both wind-tunnel experiments and a large eddy simulation (LES) are carried out to study the effects of local vibration on drag reduction over a wide range of angles of attack. The application parameters of local vibration on the upper surface of the airfoil are first evaluated by numerical simulations. The mounted position is chosen at 0.065–0.09 of chord length from the leading edge. The influence of oscillation frequency is investigated both by numerical simulations and experiments. The optimal frequencies are near the dominant frequencies of shear layer vortices and wake vortices. The patterns of shear vortices caused by local vibration are also studied to determine the drag reduction mechanism of this flow control method. The results indicate that local vibration can improve the aerodynamic performance of the airfoil. In particular, it can reduce the drag by changing the vortex generation patterns.
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Abbreviations
- x :
-
coordinate along the length of the airfoil
- ±y t :
-
thickness coordinates above and below the line extending along the length of the airfoil
- h :
-
maximum thickness of the airfoil
- c :
-
chord of the airfoil
- y v :
-
vertical position coordinate of the vibrating part
- A :
-
amplitude of vibration
- t :
-
time of vibration
- p 1 :
-
horizontal coordinate of the front end on the vibrating part
- p 2 :
-
horizontal coordinate of the back end on the vibrating part
- C L :
-
airfoil lift coefficient
- C D :
-
airfoil drag coefficient
- f :
-
frequency of vibration
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Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 11532011) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 2017FZA4031)
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Lou, B., Ye, S., Wang, G. et al. Numerical and experimental research of flow control on an NACA 0012 airfoil by local vibration. Appl. Math. Mech.-Engl. Ed. 40, 1–12 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10483-019-2404-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10483-019-2404-8