Effect of novel synthetic jet on wake vortex shedding modes of a circular cylinder

A novel actuator signal achieved by changing the ratio of the suction duty cycle to the blowing duty cycle is adopted to enhance the control effect of the synthetic jet for the flow around a circular cylinder. The suction duty cycle factor k defined as the ratio between the time duration of the suction cycle and the blowing cycle and the equivalent momentum coefficient Cμ are introduced as the determining parameters. The synthetic jet is positioned at the rear stagnation point in order to introduce symmetric perturbations upon the flow field. The proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) technique is applied for the analysis of the spanwise vorticity field. Increasing the suction duty cycle factor, the momentum coefficient is enhanced, and thus a stronger and larger scale synthetic jet vortex pair with a higher convection velocity is generated. The synthetic jet vortex pair interacts with the spanwise vorticity shear layers behind both sides of the cylinder, resulting in the variations of the wake vortex shedding modes at Re=950: for k=0.25, Cμ=0.148, vortex synchronization at the subharmonic excitation frequency with antisymmetric shedding mode; for 0.50≤k≤1.00, 0.213≤Cμ≤0.378, vortex synchronization at the excitation frequency with the symmetric or antisymmetric shedding modes; for 2.00≤k≤4.00, 0.850≤Cμ≤2.362, vortex synchronization at the excitation frequency with symmetric shedding mode. Hence, the control effect of the synthetic jet upon the wake vortex of a circular cylinder can be enhanced by increasing the suction duty cycle factor so as to increase the momentum coefficient. This is also validated at a higher Reynolds number Re=1600.