Separation control on NACA23012 using synthetic jet

A numerical study of separation control has been made to investigate aerodynamic characteristics of NACA23012 airfoil with synthetic jets. Computed results demonstrated that stall characteristics and control surface performance could be substantially improved by resizing separation vortices. The maximum lift was obtained when the separation point coincides with the synthetic jet location and the non-dimensional frequency is about 1. In addition, separation control effect was proportional to the peak velocity of the synthetic jet. It was observed that the actual flow control mechanism and flow structure is 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, and as a result, the size of the leading edge vortex was remarkably reduced. For high frequency range, however, small vortex did not grow up enough to penetrate into the leading edge separation vortex. Instead, synthetic jet firmly attached the local flow and influenced the circulation of the virtual airfoil shape which is the combined shape of the main airfoil with the separation vortex. As a way to reduce the jet peak velocity, performance of a multi-array synthetic jet was investigated. Moreover, a high frequency multi-location synthetic jet was exploited to efficiently eliminate the unstable flow structure which was observed in low frequency range. Finally, by changing the phase angle in multi-location synthetic jets, highly controlled flow characteristics could be obtained with multi-array/multi-location synthetic jets. This shows efficiency of the current approach in separation control using synthetic jet.