Control of the Transitional Boundary Layer

Abstract

This work makes advances in the delay of boundary layer transition from laminar to turbulent flow via feedback control. The applications include the reduction of drag over streamline bodies (e.g., airplane wings) and the decrease of mixing and heat transfer (e.g., over turbine blades in jet engines).

A difficulty in many fields is designing feedback controllers for high-dimensional systems, be they experiments or high-fidelity simulations, because the required time and resources are too large. A cheaper alternative is to approximate the high-dimensional system with a reduced-order model and design a controller for the model. We implement several model reduction algorithms in "modred", an open source and publicly available library that is applicable to a wide range of problems.

We use this library to study the role of sensors and actuators in feedback control of transition in the 2D boundary layer. Previous work uses a feedforward configuration in which the sensor is upstream of the actuator, but we show that the actuator-sensor pair is unsuitable for feedback control due to an inability to sense the exponentially-growing Tollmien-Schlichting waves. A new actuator-sensor pair is chosen that more directly affects and measures the TS waves, and as a result it is effective in a feedback configuration. Lastly, the feedback controller is shown to outperform feedforward controllers in the presence of unmodeled disturbances.

Next, we focus on a specific type of actuator, the single dielectric barrier discharge (SDBD) plasma actuator. An array of these plasma actuators is oriented to produce stream-wise vorticity and thus directly cancel the structures with the largest transient growth (so-called stream-wise streaks). We design a feedback controller using only experimental data by first developing an empirical input-output quasi-steady model. Then, we design feedback controllers for the model such that the controllers perform well when applied to the experiment.

Lastly, we also simulate the plasma actuators and determine a suitable numerical model for the forces they create by comparing with experimental results. This physical force model is essential to future numerical studies on delaying bypass transition via feedback control and plasma actuation.