A numerical study on internal and external flow fields of synthetic jet actuator

The synthetic jet technology is a new active flow control method, which was through injecting small-scale perturbation into incoming flow at key points to realize flow control. In this paper, the actuator model was established, which integrates the fields of actuator chamber, actuator exit access and outer flow into one whole flow field. Then the formation and evolution of synthetic jet were simulated numerically by the finite volume method. The effects of actuation frequencies on flow velocities and distributions were discussed. It shows that jet velocities and jet evolutional distances as 300Hz of actuation frequency were better than other frequencies investigated in this paper. Furthermore, some computed results are obtained, which offer theory basis for synthetic jet technology applying in airfoil flow control of MAVS.