Control of a swept-wing boundary layer using ring-type plasma actuators

Abstract

Application of ring-type plasma actuators for control of laminar–turbulent transition in a swept-wing boundary layer is investigated thorough direct numerical simulations. These actuators induce a wall-normal jet in the boundary layer and can act as virtual roughness elements. The flow configuration resembles experiments by Kim et al. (2016 Technical Report. BUTERFLI Project TR D3.19, http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/46529). The actuators are modelled by the volume forces computed from the experimentally measured induced velocity field at the quiescent air condition. Stationary and travelling cross-flow vortices are triggered in the simulations by means of surface roughness and random unsteady perturbations. Interaction of vortices generated by actuators with these perturbations is investigated in detail. It is found that, for successful transition control, the power of the actuators should be increased to generate jet velocities that are one order of magnitude higher than those used in the experiments by Kim et al. (2016) mentioned above.