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Unsteady numerical investigation of two different corrugated airfoils

An unsteady, two-dimensional numerical study was conducted to investigate the aerodynamic and flow characteristics of two bio-inspired corrugated airfoils at Re = 14,000 and compared with those of a smooth NACA0010 airfoil. Mean aerodynamic results reveal that the corrugated airfoils have better lift performance compared to the NACA0010 airfoil but incur slightly higher drag penalty. Mean flow streamlines indicate that this favourable performance is due to the ability of the corrugated airfoils in mitigating large-scale flow separations and stall. Unsteady flow field results show persistent formations of small recirculating vortices that remain within the corrugations at 10° angle-of-attack or less for one of the corrugated airfoil and below 15° for the other. In contrast, the flow behaviour can be highly turbulent with regular pairings of large-scale flow separation vortices along the upper surface at higher angles-of-attack. This not only disrupts the small recirculating vortices and causes them to detach from the corrugated surfaces, but it gets increasingly dominant at higher angles-of-attack resulting in regular lift and drag oscillations. At the end of each cycle, there is a sudden ejection of flow perpendicular to the airfoil surface and these disruptions manifest themselves as “kinks” in the instantaneous lift and drag of the corrugated airfoils. Therefore instead of regular fluctuations, the lift and drag curves have additional undulations. Despite that, the corrugations are able to produce larger pressure differentials between the upper and lower surfaces than the smooth airfoil. The current study demonstrates the intricate relationships between different sharp surface corrugations and favourable aerodynamic performance. In particular, results from this paper supports earlier investigations that corrugated airfoils may be used to good effects even at low Reynolds numbers, where flow separations are more likely.