Far Field Behaviour of Wingtip Vortices under Synthetic Jet-Based Control

Wingtip vortices have been proven to be detrimental to both aircraft efficiency and safety due to their adverse effects such as wake hazard, blade vortex interaction noise and induced drag. Despite the extensive literature on the subject, the number of experimental works featuring far field velocity measurements under active control is very limited. The present work deals with the experimental investigation of the effectiveness of synthetic jet actuation on the control of wingtip vortices and their wake hazard. In order to preserve the mutual induction of the counter-rotating vortices during their evolution, an unswept, low aspect ratio, squared-tipped, finite-span wing is employed. The synthetic jet actuation is based on triggering the inherent instabilities of Crow and Widnall at different values of the momentum coefficient Cμ with the goal of reducing the vortex strength and obtaining an anticipated vortex break up. Different exit geometries of the synthetic jets have been tested to analyze the effects of the jet velocity and position on the wingtip vortices. Phase-locked measurements of the velocity field in the far wake at a distance from the wing trailing edge from 26 to 80 chord lengths have been performed via stereoscopic particle image velocimetry. The effects of blowing at high momentum coefficient Cμ=1% are demonstrated to be remarkable on the mitigation of the wingtip vortices. On the other hand, both the time and phase-averaged results suggest that, at relatively low values of Cμ (0.2%), using a larger synthetic jet exit section area allows to greatly affect the wingtip vortices' features causing a striking alleviation of the vorticity distribution up to 90% with respect to the baseline reference case. In fact, due to the actuation at low frequency, the vortex instability is prematurely risen up and amplified, leading to early vortices linking and their consequent dissipation.