Effect of Air Jet Vortex Generators on the Shock Wave Boundary Layer Interaction of Transonic Wing

Abstract

The interaction between shock waves and turbulent boundary layers (SBLI) is a common phenomenon in transonic and supersonic aircraft wings. In this study, we simulated the SBLI of a classical NACA0012 wing at an angle of attack (AOA) of 1.4° and Mach number (Ma) of 0.78 using the open-source software OpenFOAM. Our results show that an air-jet vortex generator can effectively reduce the length of the separation zone and improve the lift coefficient of the airfoil. The vortex structure generated by the jet vortex generator significantly reduces the separation caused by SBLI. We conducted simulations with jet angles of 30°, 45°, and 60° and found that the larger the jet angle, the stronger the vortex and the greater the improvement in the lift coefficient. When the jet angle was 60°, the vortex structure generated by the jet vortex generator transformed the normal shock wave into a λ shock wave, resulting in a maximum increase in the lift coefficient of 2.35%. The simulations focused on exploring the effect of the jet angle and determined that that optimal jet parameters that effectively reduce SBLI damage and improve the lift coefficient of the airfoil.