Lift Enhancing of a NACA 0012 Airfoil Using Adjacent Synthetic Jets

Turbomachinery performance depends mostly on the efficient generation of lift forces, for example, as the blades in a wind turbine convert the flow's kinetic energy into mechanical rotating energy. Circulation Control has been utilized to enhance lift in aerodynamic applications. Synthetic Jets (SJ) are pulsating flows that generate from the periodic suction and blowing of a fluid from and into a cavity, generating a train of vortex pairs. If adjacent SJs are placed at the trailing edge of an airfoil, they can tilt the flow direction, causing a "jet flap" effect due to flow vectoring. In this work, we performed an unsteady simulation of such jet flap effect over a NACA0012 airfoil using the Finite Volume Method with k-ω SST turbulence model via the commercial software ANSYS Fluent. We study the effect of SJ vectoring over the airfoil performance and flow circulation. The results indicate that the SJ pair can increase the airfoil lift coefficient under certain conditions of jet frequency and phase lag. We observe direct proportionality between the jets' vectoring angle and the lift coefficient.