Harsha Vaddireddy

Birds use feathers to control separation while landing or in gusty winds. This biological high lift passive device promises simple and cost effective solution for application on MAV/UAV as aerodynamic performance drastically reduces at low Reynolds numbers(10^4-10^5) where these aircrafts fly. The feathers are modeled as rigid flap and applied on widely used R/C plane airfoil SD8020 at low Reynolds number of 40000. Over Set mesh is used for modelling the airfoil and flap. Pointwise meshing tool is used to generate structured mesh and Commercial Solver Metacomp CFD++ is used for analysis of flow field and associated physics. 2D & 3D steady computations are done in this project. In 2D stall that occurs due to bursting of laminar separation bubble was completely eliminated. Additional to this effect of Gurney flap with different lengths in combination of self activating flap was simulated. Considerable lift enhancement is obtained but at expense of drag. Tecplot and MATLAB are used for Post Processing the results.