Analysis of travelling and standing wave morphing around an A320 wing prototype in the subsonic regime using POD and SPOD
Please login to view abstract download link
This study investigates the morphing effects around the Intermediate Scale “IS” Airbus A320 wing prototype of the European project HORIZON-2023-2027-PATHFINDER- Project N° 101129952-BEALIVE-"Bioinspired Electroactive multiscale Aeronautical Live skin", using a novel morphing concept of electroactive “live-skin” thanks to a significant number of piezo-ceramic actuators disposed along strategic areas of the wing’s suction side surface. A strong synergy between the experiments carried out in the S4 wind tunnel of IMFT through TRPIV and unsteady pressure and force measurements and the Hi-Fi simulations through modelling the live-skin effect by means of surface travelling and standing waves. This morphing concept is developed to drastically increase the aerodynamic performance. The morphing effects are analysed around the 70 cm-chord IS prototype under low-subsonic take-off conditions at incidence of 10°, inlet velocity of 21,5m/sec corresponding to Mach number of 0.063 and Reynolds number of 1 × 10⁶. A large parametric study has been conducted by varying four key actuation parameters: wavelength, frequency, amplitude, and the position and length of the actuation zone along the chord. Numerical simulations are performed using the NSMB solver, with mesh deformation handled through an Arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian formulation. The turbulence model used is the Organised Eddy Simulation (OES) approach, sensitised to correctly capture the coherent flow structures and instability mechanisms. The objective of this study is to analyse the aerodynamic efficiency increase induced by this morphing concept able to manipulate the instabilities in the separated shear layers and in the wake. Thanks to the feedback effects at the present subsonic flow, the morphing disposed in the rear part of the wing is able to modify the wall pressure distribution up to the leading edge. The morphing introduces, in optimal cases, an eddy-blocking effect in the shear layers, injecting small-scale vortices that constrict the shear layers and significantly reduce the wake’s width and delay the development of the von Kármán instability, swept farther downstream. Overall, the present morphing demonstrates strong benefits, leading to drag reduction up to 8% and increases in aerodynamic efficiency exceeding 8%. Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) and Spectral POD (SPOD) are applied to extract, analyse and compare the coherent structures developed in the flow field in static and morphing cases.
