Aerodynamic performance increase of an A320 morphing wing in subsonic regime at Reynolds number of 1 M

  • Abou Khalil, Jacques (ONERA-IMFT-LAPLACE)
  • Asproulias, Ioannis (IMFT)
  • Maynard, Nils (IMFT-LAPLACE)
  • Delon, Xavier (ICUBE-IMFT)
  • El Akoury, Rajaa (IMFT)
  • Harran, Gilles (IMFT)
  • Rouchon, Jean-François (LAPLACE)
  • Braza, Marianna (IMFT)

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An electroactive morphing “live-skin” approach has been developed by the IMFT and LAPLACE laboratories to enhance aerodynamic performance in subsonic flow. The system employs piezoelectric actuators positioned near the trailing edge and near 70% of the chord (Fig. 1). Experimental investigation was conducted on an Intermediate Scale (IS) A320 wing prototype within the HORIZON-2023-2027-PATHFINDER- Open Project N° 101129952-BEALIVE-"Bioinspired Electroactive multiscale Aeronautical Live skin", http://horizon-europe-bealive.eu/. The concept is bioinspired by both sharks and birds, aiming to implement a “live-skin” system on various A320 wing prototypes to increase the degrees of freedom of the actuation, thus enhancing the aerodynamic performance. This enhanced actuation capability enables simultaneous manipulation of the vortex dynamics and surrounding turbulence resulting - as demonstrated in the results - in lift increase, drag reduction, and mitigation of noise sources. The A320 IS, “Intermediate Scale” morphing prototype of the BEALIVE project has a 70 cm chord and 59 cm span. The experiments are carried out in the S4 subsonic wind tunnel under take-off conditions: angle of attack: 10°, Ma: 0.06, Re of 1 million. The live-skin system of the piezo-ceramic actuators near 70% chord, placed just upstream of the separation point location, enhanced local momentum and disrupted large coherent vortex structures via the eddy-blocking effect [1]. This resulted in shear layer thinning and delayed von Kármán vortex formation, thus contributing to drag reduction. At the same time, coherent structures rotating in phase with the shear layer intensified KH vortices, increasing lift. The experiments yielded a lift increase of 4%, a drag reduction of 6% as well as a 10% lift-to-drag ratio increase. The PSD analysis of the pressure signals showed an 8 dB decrease (Fig. 2–3) of the energy spectrum and of the predominant frequency peaks due to breakdown of coherent structures related to noise sources produced from the trailing edge. TRPIV with a 10kHz of sampling rate has been performed (Fig. 4), in this study, the results were supported by a SPOD analysis, which provides a frequency-resolved decomposition of the flow and highlights the dominant coherent structures (Fig 5). In strong synergy, Hi-Fi simulations were conducted using the NSMB solver with an ALE framework [2,3] and the Organised Eddy Simulation - OES turbulence model [4,5].