Flow control has emerged as an enabling technology to improve vehicles’ performance. It involves passive and active devices to affect a beneficial change in wall-bounded or free-shear flows. The presentation will provide and demonstrate a few ideas to control flows and the route(s) to application. The talk will be divided into three major parts:
- Current and future activities in the Center for Flow Physics and Control at RPI.
- Piezoelectric-based actuators, including synthetic jets, dynamic low aspect ratio, surface mounted pins, and Piezoelectrically Driven Oscillating Surface (PDOS) actuators and their interaction with different cross flows. This will include a flow over a flat plat, laminar-turbulent transition control, and separation control over flapped airfoils.
- Application: performance enhancement of a vertical tail of a commercial airplane using distributed finite span Synthetic Jet actuators – from small-scale wind tunnel model(s) to flight.
