Active Flow Control of Flapping Airfoil Using Openfoam

The concept of the fixed wing Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) has received increasing interest over the past few decades, with the principal aim of carrying out the surveillance missions. The design of the flapping wing MAVs still is in infancy stage. On the other hand, there has been increasing interest over the flow control using plasma actuators in worldwide. The aim of this research is to study the flow control of a flapping airfoil with and without plasma actuation in OpenFOAM. The OpenFOAM CFD platform has been used to develop our own plasma solver. For the plasma induced turbulence in the flow regime, k-epsilon turbulence model was adopted to address the interaction between plasma and fluid flows. For the plasma-fluid interaction, we use reduced-order modelling to solve the plasma induced electric force. A two dimensional NACA0012 flapping airfoil without plasma actuation study has been benchmarked with previous published literature. We have not only focused on the active flow control but also analyzed the important parameter reduced frequency at different values, those are 0.1, 0.05 and 0.025. Reduced frequency (kappa) is very important parameter of an airfoil in the unsteady motion. Our major contribution is testing the several reduced frequencies with the plasma actuation. The positive and beneficial effects of the plasma actuator for all cases have been observed. From the observed results, the flapping with plasma actuation at reduced frequency of 0.1 showed the 14.285 percent lift improvement and the 16.19 percent drag reduction than the flapping without plasma actuation at the respective dynamic stall angles. The maximum lift coefficient is increased with the increase in reduced frequency. In overall, plasma actuators are effective in the flow control of a flapping airfoil. In future, the combination of the flapping with plasma actuators will be a promising application to boast the maneuverability of MAVs.