Actuators are transducers that convert an electrical signal to a desired physical quantity. Active flow control actuators modify a flow by providing an electronically controllable disturbance. The field of active flow control has witnessed explosive growth in the variety of actuators, which is a testament to both the importance and challenges associated with actuator design. This review provides a framework for the discussion of actuator specifications, characteristics, selection, design, and classification for aeronautical applications. Actuator fundamentals are discussed, and various popular actuator types used in low-to-moderate speed flows are then described, including fluidic, moving object/surface, and plasma actuators. We attempt to highlight the strengths and inevitable drawbacks of each and highlight potential future research directions.

Actuators for Active Flow Control

In this review, we present control methods for flow over a bluff body such as a circular cylinder, a 2D bluff body with a blunt trailing edge, and a sphere. We introduce recent major achievements in bluff-body flow controls such as 3D forcing, active feedback control, control based on local and global instability, and control with a synthetic jet. We then classify the controls as boundary-layer controls and direct-wake modifications and discuss important features associated with these controls. Finally, we discuss some other issues such as Reynolds-number dependence, the lowest possible drag by control, and control efficiency.

Control of Flow Over a Bluff Body

Closed-Loop Turbulence Control: Progress and Challenges

Drag reduction strategies for the turbulent flow around a D-shaped body are examined experimentally and theoretically. A reduced-order vortex model describes the interaction between the shear layer and wake dynamics and guides a path to an efficient feedback control design. The derived feedback controller desynchronizes shear-layer and wake dynamics, thus postponing vortex formation. This actuation is tested in a wind tunnel. The Reynolds number based on the height of the body ranges from 23000 to 70000. We achieve a 40% increase in base pressure associated with a 15% drag reduction employing zero-net-mass-flux actuation. Our controller outperforms other approaches based on open-loop forcing and extremum-seeking feedback strategies in terms of drag reduction, adaptivity, and the required actuation energy.

Feedback shear layer control for bluff body drag reduction

This article discusses the description of wall-bounded turbulence as a deterministic high-dimensional dynamical system of interacting coherent structures, defined as eddies with enough internal dynamics to behave relatively autonomously from any remaining incoherent part of the flow. The guiding principle is that randomness is not a property, but a methodological choice of what to ignore in the flow, and that a complete understanding of turbulence, including the possibility of control, requires that it be kept to a minimum. After briefly reviewing the underlying low-order statistics of flows at moderate Reynolds numbers, the article examines what two-point statistics imply for the decomposition of the flow into individual eddies. Intense eddies are examined next, including their temporal evolution, and shown to satisfy many of the properties required for coherence. In particular, it is shown that coherent structures larger than the Corrsin scale are a natural consequence of the shear. In wall-bounded turbulence, they can be classified into coherent dispersive waves and transient bursts. The former are found in the viscous layer near the wall and as very-large structures spanning the boundary layer thickness. Although they are shear-driven, these waves have enough internal structure to maintain a uniform advection velocity. Conversely, bursts exist at all scales, are characteristic of the logarithmic layer, and interact almost linearly with the shear. While the waves require a wall to determine their length scale, the bursts are essentially independent from it. The article concludes with a brief review of our present theoretical understanding of turbulent structures, and with a list of open problems and future perspectives.

Coherent structures in wall-bounded turbulence

In this paper, we present a new passive control device for form-drag reduction in flow over a two-dimensional bluff body with a blunt trailing edge. The device consists of small tabs attached to the upper and lower trailing edges of a bluff body to effectively perturb a two-dimensional wake. Both a wind-tunnel experiment and large-eddy simulation are carried out to examine its drag-reduction performance. Extensive parametric studies are performed experimentally by varying the height and width of the tab and the spanwise spacing between the adjacent tabs at three Reynolds numbers of Re=u ∞ h/v=20000, 40000 and 80000, where u ∞ is the free-stream velocity and h is the body height. For a wide parameter range, the base pressure increases (i.e. drag reduces) at all three Reynolds numbers. Furthermore, a significant increase in the base pressure by more than 30 % is obtained for the optimum tab configuration. Numerical simulations are performed at much lower Reynolds numbers of Re = 320 and 4200 to investigate the mechanism responsible for the base-pressure increase by the tab. Results from the velocity measurement and numerical simulations show that the tab introduces the spanwise mismatch in the vortex-shedding process, resulting in a substantial reduction of the vortical strength in the wake and significant increases in the vortex formation length and wake width.

Drag reduction in flow over a two-dimensional bluff body with a blunt trailing edge using a new passive device

The objective of the present study is to reduce drag on a two-dimensional model vehicle using the distributed forcing (Kim and Choi 2002 Proc. 5th JSME-KSME Fluids Engineering Conf., 17–21 November). The forcing (blowing and suction) is applied at the upper and lower trailing edges, and is steady in time but varies sinusoidally in the spanwise direction. Both the large eddy simulation (LES) and wind-tunnel experiment are carried out. LES is performed at the Reynolds number (Reh ) of u ∞ h/ν=4200, whereas Reh =20 000 and 40 000 are considered in the experiment, where u ∞ is the freestream velocity and h is the height of the model vehicle. It is shown by LES that a significant base-pressure recovery (i.e. drag reduction) is obtained with the present distributed forcing, together with a substantial suppression of vortex shedding in the wake behind the model vehicle. Similar results are also obtained from the experiment at higher Reynolds numbers, indicating that the present distributed forcing for drag reduc...

Woo Pyung Jeon

Papers

Control of Flow Over a Bluff Body

Drag reduction in flow over a two-dimensional bluff body with a blunt trailing edge using a new passive device

Active Control of Turbulent Flow over a Model Vehicle for Drag Reduction