Numerical simulation of fluid-solid interaction flow for two different cavity shapes

Abstract

Synthetic jet actuator is an active flow control device that has the ability to reduce the drag force on an aircraft by controlling the flow of the wing surface. This project is to study the effect of waveform signal input, frequency, cavity thickness and voltage on the performance of the exit air jet velocity of the synthetic jet actuator. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) was used to simulate the synthetic jet actuator in quiescent conditions for five different simulation configuration; type of waveform input, frequency and jet velocity profile, frequency and maximum exit jet velocity, cavity thickness, and voltage input. The simulated results of CFD then compared to the experimental results which had been carried out by previous researchers for validation. The findings are considered as acceptable since the simulation of SJA results for each configuration is similar for actual quiescent condition. CFD prove to be a faster and cheaper tools for the development of SJA design. However, there are still other parameters that can be studied in order to improve the performance of synthetic jet