Increasing the power efficiency of rotors at transitional Reynolds numbers with synthetic jet actuators

Characterisation of boundary layer transition over a low Reynolds number rotor

“…Experimental investigations on boundary layer transition for rotor blades are relatively scarce. Maldonado and Gupta [21] studied the impact of piezoelectric-based synthetic jet actuators on the boundary layer development over a 3 bladed rotor(S809 aerofoil, Re = 1.8 × 10 5 ) using Laser-Doppler Velocity (LDV) measurements. Contemporary boundary layer transition research on rotors most commonly uses IR thermography, where investigations on laminar to turbulent transition in rotary wing configurations entail more experimental difficulties than in fixed wing configurations.…”

Application of synthetic jet arrays for flow separation control on a circular “hump” model

“…During active flow control, additional energy is required to change the fluid flow in order to generate the favourable effects. Active flow control has different applications in industries including flow separation control (Seifert & Pack, 2002;Esfahani et al, 2019, Messanelli et al, 2019, turbulence control (Rathnasingham & Breuer, 2003), mixing enhancement , vectoring (Xia & Luo, 2007), improvement of heat (Arshad et al, 2020) and mass transfer (Tesa, 2009), increasing the power efficiency of rotors (Maldonado & Gupta, 2019), and aerodynamic improvement of micro-aerial vehicles (Ugrina & Flatau, 2005).…”

Synthetic jets as a flow control device for performance enhancement of vertical axis hydrokinetic turbines: A 3D computational study

“…On the other hand, Maldonado and Gupta [ 15 ] experimentally studied the performance of a 3-blades rotor with an S809 airfoil and 60 synthetic jet actuators. At an angular velocity of 500 rpm, the activation of 20 SJs per blade decreases the energy requirement of the rotor by 10.6%, demonstrating that they are a feasible solution for improving the power efficiency of rotors.…”