A 2D Simulation of the Flow Separation Control over a NACA0015 Airfoil Using a Synthetic Jet Actuator

The present study aims to investigate numerically the flow control possibility using a synthetic jet actuation over a bi-dimensional NACA0015 airfoil manoeuvring at a highly turbulent flow (8.9e10⁵ Reynolds to chord number). The 2-D flow behaviour was computed using the ANSYS Fluent commercial code. The so-called Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stocks (RANS) approach has been tested for one (Spalat-Allmaras S-A) and two (K-ε) transport equations for the turbulence modelling. Both present a weakness to predict the stall angle effectively. The S-A lift coefficient slope seems to be the closest to the experimental data. The synthetic jet control exhibits an extraordinary lift coefficient enhancement at high Angles Of Attack (AOA) but seems to be less obvious at low AOA, where the flow is still attached. A synthetic jet of a Strouhal (St = 2) and momentum (Cμ of 0.56%), delays the stall onset from 15 to 19deg with enhancing the lift coefficient by 40%. The actual work has been enriched by studying the effect of the jet's frequency and momentum on the lift temporal signal. Also, the interaction between the mean flow and the synthetic jet structures topology was undertaken.