Section: Application Domains

Active flow control for vehicles

The reduction of CO2 emissions represents a great challenge for the automotive and aeronautic industries, which committed respectively a decrease of 20% for 2020 and 75% for 2050. This goal will not be reachable, unless a significant improvement of the aerodynamic performance of cars and aircrafts is achieved (e.g. aerodynamic resistance represents 70% of energy losses for cars above 90 km/h). Since vehicle design cannot be significantly modified, due to marketing or structural reasons, active flow control technologies are one of the most promising approaches to improve aerodynamic performance. This consists in introducing micro-devices, like pulsating jets or vibrating membranes, that can modify vortices generated by vehicles. Thanks to flow non-linearities, a small energy expense for actuation can significantly reduce energy losses. The efficiency of this approach has been demonstrated, experimentally as well as numerically, for simple configurations  [167].

However, the lack of efficient and flexible numerical tools, that allow to simulate and optimize a large number of such devices on realistic configurations, is still a bottleneck for the emergence of this technology in industry. The main issue is the necessity of using high-order schemes and complex models to simulate actuated flows, accounting for phenomena occurring at different scales. In this context, we intend to contribute to the following research axes:

• Sensitivity analysis for actuated flows. Adjoint-based (reverse) approaches, classically employed in design optimization procedure to compute functional gradients, are not well suited to this context. Therefore, we propose to explore the alternative (direct) formulation, which is not so much used, in the perspective of a better characterization of actuated flows and optimization of control devices.

• Isogeometric simulation of control devices. To simulate flows perturbed by small-scale actuators, we investigate the use of isogeometric analysis methods, which allow to account exactly for CAD-based geometries in a high-order hierarchical representation framework. In particular, we try to exploit the features of the method to simulate more accurately complex flows including moving devices and multiscale phenomena.