Project Title: Smart Skin for Turbulent Drag Reduction

Project Description:
Drag reduction for aerial vehicles has a range of positive ramifications: reduced fuel consumption with the associated economic and environmental consequences, larger flight range and endurance and higher achievable flight speeds. The ongoing work capitalizes on recent advances in active turbulent drag reduction and active material based actuation to develop a “smart” skin for turbulent drag reduction in realistic flight conditions.

The skin operation principle is based on computational evidence that spanwise traveling waves of the right amplitude, wavelength and frequency can result in significant turbulent drag reduction. Such traveling waves can be induced in the smart skin via active-material actuation. The flow control technique pursued is “micro” in the sense that only micro-scale wave amplitudes (order of 30 m) and energy inputs are sufficient to produce significant benefits.

To achieve a traveling wave profile on a skin, two actuation principles have been developed and analyzed and the feasibility of different skin designs based on these two actuation principles have been studied.

The current research effort is focused on the experimental validation of the proposed drag reduction technique. For this purpose, a mechanically actuated prototype skin, capable of generating a traveling wave has been designed and manufactured, using a rapid prototyping machine.

People Involved with Smart Skin Research
Othon Rediniotis
Mani Raghavendran