Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Proc. SPIE 6930, Industrial and Commercial Applications of Smart Structures Technologies

Abstract

The interest in synthetic-jet actuators is elicited by their employment in fluid-control applications, including boundarylayer control, combustion control etc. These actuators are zero net-mass-flux devices, and generally consist of a diaphragm mounted to enclose a volume of fluid in a cavity. The diaphragm bends sinusoidally, and fluid is periodically absorbed into and ejected from the cavity through an orifice. The outflow entrains the fluid around it and establishes a mean jet flow at some distance from the source. Piezoceramic materials have been employed to drive the actuator diaphragm, especially when actuation frequencies are in excess of a few hundreds of hertz. The piezoceramic is glued directly to a silicon diaphragm. In combustion systems, improved turbulent mixing of air and fuel proper can significantly improve efficiency and reduce pollution. In boundary-layer separation control applications, synthetic-jets are used to improve aerodynamic performance by delaying separation and stall over the airfoil. The current work describes the modeling and design process of a piezoceramic-driven synthetic-jet actuator intended, amongst other applications, to improve the aerodynamic characteristics of a specific airfoil. A separate study consisting of numerical analyses performed with the aid of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) have been run to define the necessary performance parameters for the synthetic-jet actuator. The synthetic-jet actuator design task was achieved by running fluid-structure numerical analyses for various design parameters.

DOI

10.1117/12.775564

Publication Date

2008

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