Chin-Cheng Wang1,2, Ying-Chen Tsai2, and Min-Fung Chang2
1Department of Vehicle Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, Taiwan
2Department of Mechanical Engineering, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan
The phenomenon of dynamic stall on a flapping wing is an important and practical problem. The predominant feature of dynamic stall is the leading-edge vortex (LEV) formation and shedding over the upper surface of the wing. This is accompanied by a sudden loss of lift. On the other hand, researchers have been increasing interest in dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma actuators for active flow control over the past decades. In this study, we use DBD plasma actuator at the leading edge, mid chord, and trailing edge of a flapping wing to improve aerodynamic performance, such as lift enhancement and drag reduction. Numerical simulation is performed using the open-source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software OpenFOAM. For a flapping wing with plasma actuation, the reduced-order model is incorporated into the momentum equations to solve the plasma induced electric body force. For the flow regime, the k-w turbulence model is adopted to address the interaction between plasma and fluid flows. The benchmark case will be validated with published experimental results. There would be a good improvement of lift associated with the use of plasma-based flow control devices and as such holds considerable promise for the future.
Keywords：flapping wing, dynamic stall, dielectric barrier discharge plasma actuator