Simultaneous Investigation of Flexibility and Plasma Actuation Effects on the Aerodynamic Characteristics of an Oscillating Airfoil

Abstract

In this work, a numerical study of two dimensional laminar incompressible flow around the flexible oscillating NACA0012 airfoil is performed using the open source code OpenFOAM. Oscillatory motion types including pitching and flapping is considered. Reynolds number for these motions is assumed fixed at 12000. One of the important issues that must be considered in designing air structures, in particular the aircraft wing, is the interaction between the air and the elastic aircraft wings that is known as the Aeroelastic phenomenon. For this purpose, the effect of airfoil flexibility and flow induced vibration in these motion types is investigated and compared with the case of rigid airfoil. It is observed that the flexibility in both types of motions causes improvement of the thrust which is boosted with increasing the frequency. Contrary to thrust, the significant improvement of lift is only achievable in high frequencies. It was also found that the effect of flexibility on the flapping motion is higher than the pitching motion. For flow control on the airfoil, Dielectric Barrier Discharge plasma actuator is used in the trailing edge of a flexible airfoil, and its effect on the flexible airfoil is also investigated.

Keywords

• airfoil; flapping; flexibility; fluid-structure interaction; oscillating; plasma; pitching.