Flow Control Technologies

Abstract

With the increase in fuel prices, flow control technologies are becoming of greater interest as being the means of achieving a technology quantum leap in the next generation of aircrafts, providing the means to achieve significant reduction in drag (fuel burn) and improvements in aircraft performance, shortening thus the path to accomplish the challenging Vision 2020. Although investigated and applied to some extent during the past decades, Flow Control Technologies are now experimenting a renewed interest with the development of micro and nanotechnologies, which make it more interesting and effective in today' strict standards, in particular in civil aviation. Flow Control Technologies need, in order to reach flight readiness level, extensive testing and validation at both sub-system level and representative scale before being flight-tested. These experiments will also serve to validate CFD tools, those of industrial use such as RANS and turbulence models, LES and DES, as well as more advanced codes such as DNS, which have experimented great advanced in the past few years. This presentation will illustrate the need for new advanced CFD development/validation and experimental testing in view of what has been described above as the means to make Flow Control Technologies a reality in the next generation of aircrafts.