On the Flow Behaviour of a Vortex-Trapping Cavity NACA0020 Aerofoil at Ultra-Low Reynolds Number
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17th International Symposium on Applications of Laser Techniques to Fluid Mechanics Lisbon, Portugal, 07-10 July, 2014 On the flow behaviour of a vortex-trapping cavity NACA0020 aerofoil at ultra-low Reynolds number 1 2* 1 Shengxian Shi , T.H. New and Yingzheng Liu 1: Gas Turbine Research Institute, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University 200240, Shanghai, China 2: School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798 * correspondent author: [email protected] Abstract An experimental study on a NACA0020 aerofoil with or without a semi-circular cavity on its upper surface has been performed to examine the effect of trapped vortex cell on flow separation behaviour. Particle-streak visualisations and time-resolved particle image velocimetry (TR-PIV) measurements were conducted in a low-speed recirculation water channel at ultra-low Reynolds number of Rec=5000 (based on chord length) with angles-of-attack (AOA) varying between α=0о to 20о. Time-series of instantaneous velocity fields were analysed by Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD). Flow structures of the two aerofoils were examined in detail by means of time-averaged velocity fields, dominant flow modes and phase-averaged vortex-shedding pattern. Results revealed that the trapped vortex actually results in earlier flow separation in the present flow conditions, which leads to a consistently larger wake size than the standard NACA0020 aerofoil for the tested AOAs. 1. Introduction The ever increasing demands of aerodynamically more efficient aircraft urge the developments of advanced flow-separation control techniques. Various investigations have been focused on flow control strategies dedicated towards suppressing or delaying aerofoil flow separations. One of such efforts is by trapping a vortex in an aerofoil cavity to mitigate flow separation events. The concept of vortex-trapping cavity was firstly proposed by Ringleb (1961), and Kasper (1977) firstly applied such a concept into real flight tests. He claimed that the BKB-1 tailless glider achieved better manoeuvrability at low speeds (around 20mph) by trapping a tornado like vortex over the upper wing surface. However, subsequent wind tunnel tests on a Kasper wing model did not prove the superiority of this concept over conventional clean aerofoil (Kruppa 1977). Probably due to the contradiction between flight tests and wind tunnel experiments, the research on vortex- trapping cavity aerofoil did not continue until late 1990s. Savitsky (1995) filed a patent on an “EKIP” aircraft design, which declared that the trapped vortices on the aerofoil upper surface can prevent large-scale flow separation. Chernyshenko (1995) theoretically analysed the effect of incoming flow oscillation on the stabilisation of trapped vortex, and Bunyakin et al. (1998) provided a theoretical framework on designing an aerodynamically efficient vortex-trapping cavity aerofoil. This concept regained attention in 2005 when the European Union announced the VortexCell2050 project, which aimed to develop trapped-vortex and active flow control techniques for next- generation thick-wing aircraft. De Gregorio and Fraioli (2008) performed pressure and flow measurements on an aerofoil with a vortex-trapping cavity at chord based Reynolds number of Rec=3.5×105~7.0×105, and demonstrated that flow separation can only be controlled if suction was applied in the cavity region. Similar experimental studies were performed for a modified NACA0024 aerofoil at Rec=6.67×105 and 106 to investigate the effectiveness of vortex-trapping- suction combined flow control method (Lasagna et al. 2011). It was found that the modified - 1 - 17th International Symposium on Applications of Laser Techniques to Fluid Mechanics Lisbon, Portugal, 07-10 July, 2014 aerofoil has distinct low- and high-drag modes across the tested AOA range, which correspond to stable vortex-trapping inside the cavity and large scale vortex shedding from the cavity respectively. The authors concluded that the vortex-trapping-suction is only effective for a very limited AOA range (-2° ≤ α ≤ 8°). Olsman and Colonius (2011) demonstrated numerically, by means of DNS simulations on a vortex-trapping cavity NACA0018 aerofoil at Rec=2.0×104, that the flow within the cavity exhibits two shear layer modes for different AOAs, and it helps to suppress separation or narrow wake structure regardless of the AOA variation. The modified NACA0018 aerofoil was further studied experimentally to explore the coupling between aerofoil elastic vibrations (simulated via acoustic forcings) and cavity flow oscillations at Rec=O(104)~O(105) (Olsman et al. 2011). While the oscillation of cavity shear layer did respond linearly to acoustic forcing at Rec=O(104), the pressure and lift measurements did not show significant deviation between the modified and standard NACA0018 aerofoils across the tested Reynolds numbers. These preceding works mainly focused on force measurements and theoretical/numerical analysis on flow inside vortex-trapping cavity implemented on aerofoils at high Reynolds numbers, with very little attention (e.g. flow visualisation, hot-wire) paid towards experimentally examine the flow structures associated with such aerofoils. In addition, these studies provided inconsistent conclusions on the efficiency of a trapped vortex on flow-separation control, which further intrigued the authors into exploring the differences, from flow structural point-of-view, between vortex-trapping and standard aerofoils, so as to shed some light on mechanism of flow control via trapped vortex. Towards this end, particle-streak flow visualisation and TR-PIV measurements were performed on both standard and modified NACA0020 aerofoils. POD and phase-averaged analysis were employed to allow fuller comparisons on flow structures of the standard and modified aerofoils. 2. Experimental set-up and data reduction methods Experiments were conducted in a recirculating water tunnel at School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Water was driven by a frequency invertor controlled centrifugal pump and conditioned sequentially by honeycombs, three layers of coarse-to-fine screens and a 4:1 ratio contraction section. It then entered a Plexiglas test-section with a dimension of 250 mm (H) × 150 mm (W) × 1050 mm (L). To minimise any undesired free surface effects as well as ease the mounting procedure, the test aerofoil models were enclosed within a Plexiglas frame, which has an internal dimension of 200 mm (H) × 120 mm (W) × 500 mm (L) (Fig. 1). One NACA0020 aerofoil and a modified NACA0020 aerofoil with semi-circular cavity on its upper surface were studied in the current experiments (Fig. 2). The models were machined from aluminium, and both the upper and lower surface were carefully polished and coated with matt black paint for optical measurements. The free stream velocity was maintained at approximately 0.085m/s throughout, with a resultant chord length (c=60mm) based Reynolds number of Rec=5000. The AOA varied о о о between 0 to 20 with increment of 5 . During the tests, the water tunnel was homogenously seeded with 20~30µm hollow glass beads, which scattered light after illumination from a laser sheet formed by a 8W 532nm continuous- wave DPSS laser. Two types of cameras were used for the experiments. Particle-streak images were recorded by a Canon 550D DSLR camera to obtain first-hand observations for the flow structures, while time-series particle images were captured by a 1280 × 1024 px2 Mikrotron EoSens camera at 250 frames-per-second (fps) for TR-PIV analysis. 10,000 instantaneous images were - 2 - 17th International Symposium on Applications of Laser Techniques to Fluid Mechanics Lisbon, Portugal, 07-10 July, 2014 captured for each AOA and subjected to two-pass multi-grid cross-correlation process. Using a final interrogation window size of 32 × 32 px2 with 75% overlap, a 157 × 125 velocity matrix was obtained for every image pairs (i.e. frames 1 and 2, frames 2 and 3), which provided a spatial resolution of approximately 0.95mm/vector. The raw velocity vectors were post-processed by local median filter, and any spurious vectors which were determined less than 2%, were replaced by a 3 × 3 interpolation scheme. For each tested AOA, a total of 9999 instantaneous velocity fields were produced for further POD analysis, which decomposed the flow field into different modes with associated energy coefficient, and allowed the differentiation of dominant flow structures from small scale ones (Lumley 1967, Kim and Rockwell 2005). The POD analysis also provided phase information about the flow fields, and phase-averaged wake structures were calculated by о о averaging instantaneous velocity vectors at 90 intervals at a phase bin size of 5 . Fig. 1 Mounting frame used in the current experiments (a) Standard NACA0020 aerofoil (b) Vortex-trapping NACA0020 aerofoil Fig. 2 Aerofoil geometries 3. Results and discussions Figure 3 presents flow visualisation results for the standard and vortex-trapping NACA0020 aerofoils. A direct qualitative observation from the figure is that the vortex-trapping aerofoil produces consistently larger flow separation bubble than the standard aerofoil for AOAs varying from 5о to 20о. Another interesting difference between flow structures of the two aerofoils is that the particle-streak images for the standard aerofoil tend to be much clearer than that of the vortex- trapping aerofoil, although exactly same camera parameters were used