An Experimental Study of Synthetic Jet Actuators with Application in Airfoil Limit Cycle Oscillations Control

Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) operating in tight urban environments often encounter gust-induced limit-cycle

oscillations. Based on our previous simulation studies on controller designs, this paper focuses on experimental

studies to utilizing synthetic jet actuators (SJAs) that would be used to suppress LCO in small MAVs with

uncertain actuator dynamics. The proposed robust nonlinear flight control technology employs an array of SJAs

embedded in a wing design in order to completely eliminate moving parts. The benchmark case studies on

controlling the longitudinal dynamics of a lifting surface using embedded synthetic jet actuators (SJAs) entering

limit-cycle oscillations (LCOs) due to impinging upstream vertical flow disturbances including deterministic

gust and stochastic turbulence. In this experimental study a symmetric-Glauert (SG) airfoil with embedded

synthetic jet actuators (SJAs) is developed and parametric analysis are conducted to investigate the effect of

actuator location along the airfoil surface, Reynolds number, and angle of attack. Results of this study

demonstrated the actuator effectiveness on overall aerodynamic performance and show consistent trend with

higher-order computational fluid dynamics (CFD).