In June 2003, before being retired to the Smithsonian Museum Annex, near Dulles Airport, the only remaining XV-15 tiltrotor aircraft was used for a series of flight tests to demonstrate the effectiveness of Active Flow control (AFC) in reducing the download during hover. The flaps/ailerons were retrofitted with actuators delivering zero-mass-flux periodic jets emanating fro slots positioned tangential to the surface. The flight tests followed two extensive sets of model experiments, and the program included participation from University of Arizona, Illinois Institute of Technology, Tel Aviv University, Bell Helicopter and Boeing under the sponsorship of the Micro-Adaptive Flow Control (MAFC) program of DARPA. The over six hours of flight tests successfully achieved the two goals and documented reduction in the download forces by 9 to 14 %, thereby demonstrating for the first time that the aerodynamic principals of AFC extend to full-scale flight. This successful application of AFC opens new vistas in the design of products using novel fluid dynamic concepts. It may not only generate new configurations of airplanes or combustors but it may also be used in many medical and biological applications; after all, most of the flows in humans and animals are pulsating and often separated. this requires an infrastructure that considers unsteady flow parameters with the same commitment as the infrastructure that was built nearly half a century ago to understand high-speed flows, Furthermore the development of actuators from micro to macro size will need to be addressed, if active flow control is to truly succeed in a ubiquitous way. The experience gained from the XV-15 download reduction will be discussed with an emphasis on new insight and physical understanding in the context of this broadly defined flow control of separation.
First-In-Flight Full-Scale Application of Active Flow Control: The XV-15 Tiltrotor Download Reduction
2004
35 pages
Report
No indication
English
Aircraft , Tilt rotor aircraft , Control , Flight testing , Parameters , High velocity , Surfaces , Combustors , Flight , Model tests , Configurations , Tangents , Flaps(Control surfaces) , Actuators , Unsteady flow , Fluid dynamics , Flow separation , Hovering , Ailerons , Tiltrotors , Xv-15 aircraft
Strategies For Tiltrotor Airframe Download Reduction Using Active Flow Control
Online Contents | 2006
|Strategies for tiltrotor airframe download reduction using active flow control
Tema Archive | 2004
|Strategies For Tiltrotor Airframe Download Reduction Using Active Flow Control
British Library Conference Proceedings | 2004
|