Summary of the 2004 computational fluid dynamics validation workshop on synthetic jets

A computational-fluid-dynamics (CFD) validation workshop for synthetic jets and turbulent separation control (CFDVAL2004) was held in Williamsburg, Virginia, in March 2004. Three cases were investigated: a synthetic jet into quiescent air, a synthetic jet into a turbulent boundary-layer crossflow, and the flow over a hump model with no-flow-control, steady suction, and oscillatory control. This is a summary of the CFD results from the workshop. Although some detailed results are shown, the CFD state of the art for predicting these types of flows is mostly evaluated from a general point of view. Overall, for synthetic jets, CFD can only qualitatively predict the flow physics, but there is some uncertainty regarding how to best model the unsteady boundary conditions from the experiment consistently. As a result, there is wide variation among CFD results. For the hump flow, CFD is capable of predicting many of the particulars of this flow, provided that it accounts for tunnel blockage, but it consistently overpredicts the length of the separated region compared to the experimental results.