Separation Control Mechanism of Airfoil using Synthetic Jet

Numerical simulation of separation control using a synthetic jet was performed on NACA23012 airfoil. The computed results showed that stall characteristics and control surface performance could be improved substantially by resizing the separation vortices. It was observed that actual flow control mechanism was fundamentally different depending on the range of synthetic jet frequency. For low frequency range, small vortices due to synthetic jet penetrated to the large leading edge separation vortex flow, and as a result, the size of the leading edge separation vortex remarkably decreased. For high frequency range, however, the small vortex did not grow enough to penetrate into the large separation vortex, but the synthetic jet changed airfoil circulation directly. The synthetic jet conditions for effective lift increase are as follows: the non-dimensional frequency of the synthetic jet is 1; the location of the synthetic jet slot is the same as the separation point; and the jet velocity is large enough to perturb the separated flow. By exploiting these conditions, it was observed that the combination of the synthetic jet with a simple high lift device could be as good as a conventional fowler flap system.Authors are gratefully acknowledging the financial supports by Agency for Defense Development and FVRC (Flight Vehicle Research Center, Seoul National University), the Brain Korea 21 Project in 2006 and the Smart UAV Development Program of the 21th Frontier R&D Program sponsored by the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy