The Passive Separation Control of an Airfoil Using Self-adaptive Hairy Flaps

The control of boundary layer separation, to bring about performance enhancements on air/water vehicles, has been a very active research area in recent years. In this paper, the passive separation control of a Naca0012 airfoil via a rigid/flexible flap at Reynolds number Re = 1000 is investigated. The effects of the flap configurations (length, attachment position, deployment angle and material properties) on the airfoil aerodynamic performance which is quantified by mean lift and mean drag are investigated. Compared to the clean Naca0012 airfoil case, via the passive separation control of flap with optimal configuration, the mean lift coefficient is improved by 13.51%, and the mean drag coefficient is decreased by 3.67%.