Effect of Longitudinal Ridges on the Aerodynamic Characteristics of an Airfoil

Tufan Kumar Guha1, Erik Fernandez2 and Rajan Kumar3 Florida Center for Advanced Aero-Propulsion FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL - 32310 A pair of longitudinal ridges is employed to enhance the aerodynamic efficiency of an USA-35B airfoil used in a remotely controlled aircraft wing. Measurements include surface static pressure distributions, 2-dimensional and stereo particle image velocimetry. In the present study, the height and inter-ridge spacing were varied to find optimal control configuration for maximum effectiveness. The results show that the baseline airfoil exhibits a massive flow separation on the suction side at an angle of incidence of 12 and beyond. With the addition of optimal longitudinal ridges, the stall angle was significantly delayed and the flow was completely attached up to an angle of incidence of 16. These results clearly show the benefit of using longitudinal ridges as an effective flow control technique for improving aerodynamic characteristics of an aircraft wing. Nomenclature = Reynolds number based on airfoil chord length = Pressure coefficient (= (ps - p)/q) = Local static pressure on the airfoil surface = Freestream static pressure = Freestream total pressure = Freestream dynamic pressure = Diameter of the longitudinal ridges = Inter-ridge spacing = Ensemble-averaged (mean) steamwise velocity = Freestream velocity (=20m/s)

Rec Cp PS P P0 q D S U Uin

I. Introduction

VER the years, many different methods for enhancing the aerodynamic performance of a wing have been proposed, verified by wind-tunnel and flight tests and eventually incorporated in the flight vehicle. An airfoil section, an essential part of a wing, has its primary task as a lift generator, therefore, an optimized design of the airfoil is the prerequisite to the satisfactory performance of the lifting surface. It has always been a challenge of optimizing and enhancing its lift without seriously increasing the drag. Also, it is now well known that the flow separation over an airfoil at high angle of attacks severely degrades its performance, particularly reduction in lift and increase in drag. To counteract this problem a wide variety of active1-5 and passive6-8 flow control devices have been developed and researched upon and undoubtedly they help to mitigate the problem to a certain extent. But a lot of these techniques can be termed as empirical, since there is a lack of complete understanding of the underlying physics of interaction between the device and the flow. One of the passive control techniques that has been studied in depth is the use of ribblets for skin friction drag reduction. Riblets9-10, which are micro-grooves on the surface and aligned to the freestream direction have shown a viscous drag reduction in the range of 48% on a variety of twodimensional flows with zero or mild pressure gradients at subsonic speeds. However, the performance of these devices in adverse pressure gradients and at supersonic speeds is questionable. An experimental study conducted by Zverkov et al.14 have shown that a wavy wing surface affect the location of the transition point in the boundary layer and reduces the size of separation bubble. Motivated by the techniques of drag reduction observed in aquatic animals, Fish et al.11 studied the use of leading edge tubercles (typically found in humpback whale flipper) for lift
1 2

Graduate Research Assistant, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Student Member AIAA. Graduate Research Assistant, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Student Member, AIAA 3 Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Senior Member AIAA. 1 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

enhancement and drag reduction. The leading edge tubercles may function to generate streamwise vortices by excitation of flow to maintain lift and prevent stall at high angles of attack. Another approach to increase the lift at moderate angles of attack has been to somehow trap the vortex on the suction side of the wing. Rossow12 at NASA Ames through his 2D inviscid, incompressible calculations proposed the use of two spanwise wing fences to trap the vortex. The aim of our research is to focus on the understanding of the mechanisms associated with the stall characteristics, particularly flow separation at high angles of incidence and develop a flow control technique to enhance the aerodynamic performance of an airfoil over a wide range of Reynolds number. In the present study we have used USA-35B airfoil (Fig. 2) and characterized its performance over a range of test conditions. We have introduced a flow control method by attaching longitudinal (chordwise) thin ridges, near the mid-section of the airfoil. We anticipate that the placement of chordwise ridges along the airfoil section will have multiple flow control effects in terms of restricting the spanwise vortex movement, generation of streamwise vorticity and energizing the flowfield due to entrainment near the surface. Measurements include surface static pressure distributions and particle image velocimetry. The initial results of this control technique are very encouraging in terms of increase in maximum lift coefficient, reduction in size or even elimination of separation bubble and a delay in stall angle.

II. Test Facility and Measurements

A. Low Speed Wind Tunnel Measurements were made in the low speed wind tunnel at the Florida Center for Advanced Aero propulsions (FCAAP) at the Florida State University. The facility is a closed loop wind tunnel with continuous operation over extended period. The test section is manufactured with acrylic walls and has dimensions of 24 x 24 x 60, which allows for flow visualization from all the four sides. It is driven by a 240 HP fan which is controlled with a variable frequency drive (VFD; Toshiba H9425KAA) and a precision regulator. The precision regulator is used to manipulate the fan pitch angle while maintaining a particular fan RPM with the help of the VFD. The flow travels through a heat exchanger and a flow straightener section which allows for constant flow temperature and minimum flow fluctuations. Accurate velocities can be obtained between a range of 2 90 m/s with a test section freestream turbulence intensity of 0.5% at 20m/sec. The present tests were carried out at a freestream velocity of 20m/sec and corresponding Reynolds number of 5.1 x 10 5 based on a chord length of 14.45 inches. Wind tunnel velocity is measured by a pitot-static probe mounted 0.75 m upstream of the test section and is monitored using a 0 - 0.1 in H2O Omega differential pressure transducer with 0.5% full scale accuracy. B. Test Model USA-35b Airfoil The airfoil studied is a section of a USA-35b wing used in a RC plane. The span of the airfoil section is 24, so that it is flushed with the walls of the test section and its chord length is 14.45 (Fig. 2). The airfoil is mounted at a distance of 8 downstream of the beginning of the test section and 12 from the floor of the wind tunnel, as shown in in Fig. 1.

a) Subsonic windtunnel facility Fig. 1. Experimental Setup 2 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

b) Mounting of Airfoil

S b = 24

C = 14.45

x/C = 0.9

a) Experimental wing section

b) Schematics of test model

Fig. 2. Airfoil with longitudinal ridges To measure the surface static pressure distributions, 31 pressure ports of 0.02 diameter are drilled at the midsection of the airfoil. The airfoil can be rotated with respect to the freestream and fixed at a chosen angle of attack in the range of -4 to 20. The initial tests were carried out on the baseline airfoil and later two ridges on the two sides of pressure generator were introduced to study the effect of control (Fig. 2a). The separation distance (S) between these two ridges was varied between 1 8 (Fig. 2b). The ridges covered the airfoil surface up to 90 % of chord length on both the suction and the pressure side. This was done so that the airfoil maintains the characteristic of a sharp trailing edge. The longitudinal ridges were made of two flexible circular tubes and were mounted on the airfoil surface along its contour (Fig. 1). The diameter of the circular tubes was also varied from 0.05 0.2 in these experiments (Fig. 2b). These tubes were covered with a smooth tape to achieve a nearly Gaussian surface profile and to avoid non-uniformity near the surface. The non dimensionalized height (D/C) of the ridges with respect to the chord length is 0.0035 to 0.014. The incoming boundary layer thickness () at quarter-chord was estimated to be approximately 0.15-inch and the corresponding non-dimensionalized /C is equal to 0.01. Table 1 shows the set of experimental test conditions. Table 1. Experimental test conditions Parameter Angle of Attack Symbol D Diameter of Ridge D/C S Inter-ridge Spacing S/C 0.07, 0.14, 0.28, 0.42, 0.56 0, 0.0035, 0.007, 0.014 0, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 Parametric Values 0, 12, 14, 16 0, 0.05, 0.1, 0.2

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C. Measurements Measurements include surface static pressure distributions and particle image velocimetry at the mid chord of the airfoil. The Reynolds number based on chord length at a freestream velocity of 20 m/s is 5.1 x 105. The angle of incidence was varied from 0 - 20. The static pressures were measured with a Omega 0-0.3 psid pressure transducer (Model PX138) with a full scale error of 1%. The pressure data was sampled (1000 samples) at each port at 100 Hz for 10 secs to ensure flow stabilization and minimize statistical errors. Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) was used to obtain quantitative measurements of the flow field of interest. Two dimensional planar PIV and three dimensional stereoscopic PIV were employed in this study. For all planar 2D PIV cases presented, measurements were carried out at the airfoil mid-span (x-y plane) and the flow was examined over the aft 60% of the airfoil to capture the separation effects. Stereo PIV cross planes (yz plane) at selected chordwise locations covered a center span of approximately 0.52 z/C. Figure 3 shows the PIV measurement locations and extent of laser sheet on the airfoil section. The flow was illuminated by a pulsed Quantel Nd:YAG laser triggered at a specified time interval. The beam is focused a) 2D PIV measurement plane using a single spherical lens of appropriate focal length and the laser sheet is created when the beam passes through two cylindrical lenses (two lenses were used in order to obtain a FLOW sheet wide enough to cover the area of y z B interest). A x The air flow is seeded using a ROSCO x/C z/b fog machine and introduced into the wind A 0.5 0.4 tunnel upstream of the flow straighteners. The B 0.5 0.7 seed particles are approximately 2-5m in size. The time interval between laser pulses was approximately 30s for the presented b) Stereo PIV measurement plane cases. Image pairs were acquired at 15Hz with Fig. 3. PIV measurement locations on the airfoil section a resolution of 2560 x 2160 pixels yielding a spatial resolution of approximately 12.4 pixels/mm. Each PIV test case shown here consists of 500 ensemble averaged instantaneous image pairs in order to estimate the mean statistics of interest. Images were acquired and processed using LaVision Davis 8 software with a 5.5 megapixel sCMOS camera equipped with a 55mm focal length lens. Velocity correlations were made using a final adaptive interrogation window size of 48 x 48 pixels with a decreasing size multipass algorithm. All passes used a 50% window overlap. The measurement uncertainty is estimated to be about 1% in ensemble-averaged velocity measurements with a 95% confidence level.

III. Results and Discussion

As briefly mentioned in the introduction, the main objective of the present study is to characterize the airfoil near stall conditions particularly measure the effect of control on stall angle, the location and the reduction in the extent of flow separation. Here we present results in the form of surface static pressure distributions, 2D velocity field and a few stereo PIV measurements at selected conditions.

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A. Surface Static Pressure Distributions Surface static pressure distributions are presented in the form of coefficient of pressure Cp = (p - p)/q, (Where p is the free-stream static pressure and q is the free-stream dynamic pressure) as a function of non-dimensionalized chordwise distance, x/C. Figures 4-5 show the effect of longitudinal ridges at 0, 12 and 14 angles of attack, respectively. As may be seen from these pressure distributions that for the baseline airfoil, the flow is attached at 0 angle of incidence (Fig. 4) and remain attached up to angle of 11 (not shown here). The flow is separated at 12 (Fig. 5) with a large separation bubble as indicated by a plateau region on the suction side of the airfoil. At higher angles the size of separation bubble is further increased and larger area of airfoil is subjected to reverse flow. With the addition of two longitudinal ridges (D/C = 0.008, S/C = 0.14) on the surface of airfoil, it is clearly observed that there is an increase in the value of suction peak at all angles of incidence and the effects are more pronounced at higher angles of incidence, particularly near the stall angles. The plateau region corresponding to separation bubble is modified to attached flow profile. From these pressure distributions it appears that with the addition of longitudinal ridges the flow is attached up to 14 angle of Fig. 4. Surface static pressure distributions at = 0 attack. As expected the flow on the pressure side of the airfoil remain unaffected with ridges at these angles of incidence.

Fig. 5. Effect of ridges (D/C = 0.008 & S/C = 0.14) on surface static pressure distributions B. Velocity Field Particle image velocimetry (PIV) was carried out at a few selected conditions to obtain 2D velocity field along the streamwise direction perpendicular to the airfoil surface. The PIV window was selected from x/C of 0.45 to 1.03 to capture the reverse flow in the separation bubble.

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a) Baseline airfoil, = 0

b) Baseline airfoil, = 12

c) Baseline airfoil, = 14 d) Baseline airfoil, = 16 Fig. 6. Effect of angle of incidence on streamwise velocity distribution

a) Ridge height D/C = 0.007 b) Ridge height D/C = 0.014 Fig. 7. Effect of ridge height on streamwise velocity distribution, S/C = 0.14, = 14 6 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

a) Ridge Spacing S/C = 0.07

b) Ridge Spacing S/C = 0.014

c) Ridge Spacing S/C = 0.028

d) Ridge Spacing S/C = 0.042

e) Ridge Spacing S/C = 0.056 Fig. 8. Effect of inter-ridge spacing on streamwise velocity distribution, S/C = 0.14, = 14

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a) Baseline airfoil b) With longitudinal ridges Fig. 9. Effect of longitudinal-ridgs on streamwise velocity distribution, D/C = 0.014, S/C = 0.14, = 16

a) Baseline airfoil b) With longitudinal ridges Fig. 10. Effect of longitudinal ridges (D/C = 0.014 & S/C = 0.42) on streamwise vorticity i. Baseline Flowfield Figure 6 shows the effect of angle of attack on the streamwise velocity contours for the baseline airfoil. The arrowheads in the streamlines indicate the direction of flow. As expected, the flow is completely attached at = 0 (Fig. 6a) and the surface streamlines follow the contour of the airfoil. An increase in angle of incidence to = 12 (Fig. 6b), the flow is separated on the airfoil suction side approximately at x/C = 0.65 and the separation bubble shows an open separation. With further increase in angle of incidence to 14 and then 16 (Figs 6c and 6d), the size of separation bubble is increased and the separation location is moved upstream leading to massive stall (indicated by reverse flow) characteristics. Due to the presence of separation bubble, the streamlines in the freestream flow have been pushed away from the surface. ii. Airfoil with Longitudinal Ridges Two chordwise longitudinal ridges were placed on the airfoil near the mid-section on either side of the airfoil centerline. As mentioned in the experimental section the height of ridges and their inter-spacing was varied in this study. Figure 7 shows the effect of the ridge height in controlling the separation on the airfoil for a fixed inter-ridge 8 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

spacing of S/C = 0.14 at an angle of incidence of 14. The dotted line indicates the airfoil surface and the solid line represent the new surface due to chordwise ridges. The results clearly show that in comparison to baseline flow at = 14(Fig. 6c), even a small thickness ridges (D/C = 0.007) reduces the size of separation bubble and pushes the separation location downstream. With an increase in ridge height to D/C = 0.014, the flow on the entire surface is completely attached. In respect to the boundary layer thickness estimated at quarter-chord ( = 0.15), the small thickness ridges are well within the boundary layer whereas a ridge height of D/C =0.014 is slightly outside. The effect of inter-ridge spacing on the streamwise velocity is shown in Fig. 8. As observed, when the ridges are too close to each other (Fig. 8a), the effectiveness in terms of separation reduction is minimal, if any. As the spacing between the two ridges was increased to S/C = 0.14 (S = 2) and 0.28 (Figs. 8b and 8c), its effectiveness improved and the separation was eliminated. With further increase in spacing to S/C = 0.42 (Fig. 8d), the results were even better in terms of completely attached flow, higher velocities near the airfoil surface and reduction in boundary layer thickness. However, when the spacing was further increased to S/C = 0.56 (Fig. 8e), a small separation bubble was observed near the trailing edge and the flow velocity near the surface was reduced. These results clearly indicate that there are optimal values of ridge height and inter-ridge spacing for which the effectiveness is the best. The optimal case of D/C = 0.014 and S/C = 0.42 was further tested at higher angles of incidence of 16 (Fig. 9) and the results show attached flow features. These results are consistent with those observed in pressure distributions, confirming the effectiveness of longitudinal ridges in enhancing the performance of airfoil near stall angles. iii. Stereo Particle Image Velocimetry In order to better understand the mechanisms responsible for the effectiveness of longitudinal ridges in eliminating separation near stall angles, the flowfield was further investigated using stereo particle image velocimetry at a few selected spanwise planes (Fig. 4). Figure 10 shows the contour plots of streamwise vorticity for the baseline flowfield and with longitudinal ridges (D/C = 0.014 and S/C = 0.42) at = 14. It may be observed that the longitudinal ridges significantly alter the flowfield close to the surface through the production of streamwise vorticity and energizing the boundary layer. These results will be further analyzed to understand the flow physics associated with this control scheme.

IV. Concluding Remarks

An experimental study measuring the effect of longitudinal ridges on the aerodynamic characteristics of an airfoil is presented. Surface static pressure distributions and particle image velocimetry are used to measure the flow control effectiveness. The results show that two chordwise ridges of optimal height and inter-ridge spacing can eliminate the separation on the suction side of this airfoil. This will result in a significant lift enhancement and drag reduction at these moderate angles of incidence and a delay in its stall angle by about 4 - 5. These results also indicate that there may be multiple flow control mechanisms responsible for the effectiveness of this flow control technique.

References
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994, pp. 146-153 Yoon, H.S., Hung, P.A., Jung, J.H., Kim, M.C., Effect of wavy leading edge on hydrodynamic characteristics for flow around low aspect ratio wing, Computers & Fluids 49 (2011) 276-289 14 Zberkov Ilya, Zanin Boris, and Kozlov Viktor, Disturbances Growth in Boundary layers on Classical and Wavy Surface Wings, AIAA Journal, Vol. 46, No. 12, December 2008
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