Parametric approach to assessing performance of high-lift device active flow control architectures

Active Flow Control is at present an area of considerable research, with multiple potential aircraft applications. While the majority of research has focused on the performance of the actuators themselves, a system-level perspective is necessary to assess the viability of proposed solutions. This paper demonstrates such an approach, in which major system components are sized based on system flow and redundancy considerations, with the impacts linked directly to the mission performance of the aircraft. Considering the case of a large twin-aisle aircraft, four distinct active flow control architectures that facilitate the simplification of the high-lift mechanism are investigated using the demonstrated approach. The analysis indicates a very strong influence of system total mass flow requirement on architecture performance, both for a typical mission and also over the entire payload-range envelope of the aircraft.