Effects of Bending of Fluidic Oscillators on Aerodynamic Performance of an Airfoil with a Flap

Abstract

The present work investigated the effects of bending the outlet nozzles of fluidic oscillators installed on the NACA0015 airfoil with a flap on the flow control performance and, thus, the aerodynamic performance of the airfoil. The effects of bending on fluidic oscillators have not been reported so far in previous works. The aerodynamic analysis was performed numerically using unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations. Three different cases were considered: Case 1 changes only the bending angle with a fixed pitch angle, Case 2 changes only the pitch angle without bending, and Case 3 changes both the bending and pitch angles. Although the bending of the oscillators was introduced inevitably due to a geometrical limitation in the installation, the results indicated that the bending rather improved the lift coefficient and lift-to-drag ratio of the airfoil by improving the characteristics of the fluidic oscillators, such as the jetting angle and peak velocity ratio.