A Review of Fluidic Oscillator Development and Application for Flow Control

Abstract

This review provides a detailed discussion of the historical development of fluidic oscillators and their application to flow control. Fluidic oscillators were initially developed in the 1960's for a variety of applications, and have seen resurgent interest for their suitability for modern flow control applications. The devices produce an oscillating jet of fluid over a wide fan angle and have no moving parts, making them an attractive actuator concept. This review aims to highlight the most important historical papers of relevance to modern fluidic oscillator development. The reviewed works will extend from the early 1960's to the most recent investigations, with a focus on the fundamental operating mechanisms of fluidic oscillators. The authors present this review as a short synopsis of fluidic oscillators for flow control, while a more comprehensive review will be submitted for archival publication in the near future.

The time-resolved natural flow field of a fluidic oscillator

“…An extensive review of the historical development and contemporary research of fluidic oscillators was presented by Gregory and Tomac (2013). In recent years, these devices have gained renewed interest as flow control actuators.…”

Experimental investigations of cavity-actuated supersonic oscillating jet

“…(5) was used as the air temperature in the cavity in Eq. (2). From this figure, one can see that when n = 1 and m = 1, there is an intersection near the Mach number of 2.7 between the Rossiter and cross junction mode; while the frequencies given by the Rossiter and modified cross junction modes are identical at a lower Mach number of 2.08, which means the coupling of the two modes will appear near this Mach number to produce the necessary flipping of the jet.…”

“…Based on the difference of the feedback mechanism, at least four types of fluidic oscillators have been invented so far, i.e., wall attachment, jet interaction, cavity resonating and vortex oscillators [2]. The wall attachment and jet interaction oscillators have been receiving more investigations in recent years, and the details on these two oscillators were summarized in the two latest review papers [2,3].…”

“…The attractive features of fluidic oscillators for flow control are their characteristics of unsteady blowing, wide range of operating frequency, and the distributed nature of momentum addition. The innovative application of fluidic oscillators to flow control problems includes separation control, jet thrust vectoring, cavity tone suppression and so on [2,3].…”

Wing Tip Drag Reduction at Nominal Take-Off Mach Number: An Approach to Local Active Flow Control with a Highly Robust Actuator System

“…Our flow control system relies on fluid amplifier components, which were first studied at the Harry Diamond Laboratories in the early 1960s [13] and have resurfaced in the form of flow control actuators in recent years, as their robustness and simplicity make them a candidate technology for transfer into industry applications. A review of different types of fluid amplifiers, and their application for flow control is given in [14]. Impressive results were obtained using this actuator type, e.g., in experiments to improve the rudder effectiveness of a full-scale vertical tail plane [15,16].…”