System-Level Assessment of Active Flow Control for Commercial Aircraft High-Lift Devices

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System-Level Assessment of Active Flow Control for Commercial Aircraft High-Lift Devices

Cai, Yu / Gao, Zhenyu / Chakraborty, Imon / Briceno, Simon / Mavris, Dimitri N.

The use of active flow control technology for augmentation of aircraft aerodynamic performance is of considerable interest to the aerospace industry. Research to date has included subscale and full-scale wind-tunnel experiments as well as limited flight-test demonstrations. Out of several possible applications of active flow control to commercial aircraft, this paper focuses on its application to high-lift devices, which may permit weight and drag reduction through simplification of the flap mechanism. These, however, must be traded off against the additional weight of the active flow control system, its power requirements, and redundancy considerations to assess net system-level impacts. In this work, the Integrated Subsystem Sizing and Architecture Assessment Capability is used to assess the system-level impact of multiple high-lift device active flow control architectures for a small twin-aisle aircraft. A comparative assessment of these architectures reveals a strong dependency of fuel burn performance and the identity of the best-performing architecture on the system total mass flow requirements. For a selected architecture, the impact of the system mass flow requirements on the off-design performance is investigated. Despite an increase in vehicle operating empty weight, fuel consumption still decreases for most missions in the payload–range envelope. Finally, the sensitivity of the architecture’s performance to several sources of uncertainty is ascertained through a sensitivity analysis, and it is observed that the uncertainty in estimation of flap track fairing drag has the most significant impact on the estimation of mission fuel burn.