Optimal Design of Active Flow Control for a Complex High-Lift Configuration

This paper presents the optimal design of an active flow control mechanism for an industry relevant complex high-lift configuration. To control the flow, a large number of synthetic jet actuators are placed on the wing and flap faces. The actuation parameters at these faces are considered as control variables. The optimal set of actuation parameters that yield maximum mean-lift is evaluated by combining an unsteady discrete adjoint RANS solver with a gradient based optimisation algorithm. The adjoint solver is developed by employing Algorithmic Differentiation (AD) techniques. Numerical results have shown that optimisation has resulted in reasonable improvement in the mean-lift compared to the initial actuated flow. This study demonstrates the robustness, accuracy and applicability of AD based unsteady adjoint solver for large scale industrial applications.