Masters Theses

Date of Award

8-2023

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Aerospace Engineering

Major Professor

Kivanc Ekici

Committee Members

Trevor M. Moeller, Zhili Zhang

Abstract

In this study, the unsteady, turbulent flow over NACA 0015 was analyzed using synthetic jets. The study focused on applying the numerical method using the commercial CFD solver Ansys Fluent. The synthetic jet simulation was carried out for Re = 896,000 for two angles of attack: 10 and 14 degrees. The optimal jet amplitude and jet frequency were determined from a range of amplitudes of 2.0 to 4.0 and frequencies of 0.4 Hz to 1.2 Hz while the jet location, jet angle, and jet width were fixed. The results showed that for both angles, the optimal amplitude and frequency were 4.0 and 0.8 Hz, respectively. As the amplitude increased, the lift-to-drag ratio went up, and the variance in frequency did not impact the aerodynamic coefficients much. The flow separation was observed at various instances for the synthetic jet which showed that when suction was applied the separation was delayed, and the opposite was true for injection. On average, the separation was delayed for both angles with the use of a synthetic jet. Additionally, the impact of steady injection and suction jets was examined. The results were similar to before where the injection jet did not improve the force characteristics, but suppression increased the lift-to-drag ratio by 53.91\% for the 10-degree case and 42.40\% for the 14-degree case. The separation location remained the same for the injection jet at 10 degrees, but with the suction jet, the flow did not separate. In the post-stall angle case, both steady injection and suction delayed separation.

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