PIV measurements of the effect of pulsed blowing jet on a NACA0012 wing model

Abstract

Wingtip vortices are present in taking off, and landing operations and their presence in airport runways must be reduced. To that end, several strategies have been considered in the last decades, being the active control one possible technical solution. To compute the effectiveness of active control that corresponds to pulsed low-blowing-ratio transverse jet for the reduction of the wingtip vortex strength, we carry out 2D-PIV measurements in a towing tank for chord-based Reynolds numbers 15000 and 20000. We consider two cases: (i) no active control Rjet=0 and (ii) pulsating radial jet of blowing-ratio Rjet smaller than 1.7 (or momentum coefficient lower than 0.12) and different Strouhal numbers ranging from 0.27 to 0.94. Our observations show that the best reduction of wingtip vortex strength takes place at the lowest Strouhal number tested. We use the maximum azimuthal velocity and vorticity together with the circulation to quantify this decrease in the vortex strength. Besides, we define the spatial evolution of a disturbance parameter which allow us to detect again the optimal frequency that leads to vortex destruction.