Recent Onera Flow Control Research on High-Lift Configurations

This paper concerns the recent and most representative work performed at Onera on the application of flow control technologies to high-lift systems of aircraft wings. Two different objectives are considered. First, keeping present architecture, flow control could either enhance the aerodynamic performance (mainly mean and stall lift coefficients) or simplify the mechanisms (flap gap or size). Secondly, a drastic geometry simplification, very attractive for aircraft manufacturers, like slot or even slat suppression, leads to a strong depletion of aerodynamic performance. In that case, the objective of flow control is to retrieve as much as possible the reference airfoil performance. Various flow control devices, from simple mechanical or fluidic vortex generators to pulsed blowing, are considered. Combined numerical and experimental studies are presented and the efficiency of the control is discussed.