Active Flow Control: Recent Advances in Fundamentals and Applications—3rd Edition

A special issue of Actuators (ISSN 2076-0825). This special issue belongs to the section "Control Systems".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2025 | Viewed by 1001

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
Interests: active flow control; data mining and data fusion in fluid mechanics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
School of Marine Science and Technology, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710072, China
Interests: active flow control; flow-structure interaction; flow-induced acoustics; computational flow dynamics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Active flow control (AFC) utilizes local active perturbations to induce global flow field changes that result in a net improvement in performance. For decades, it has been a vibrant research area with potential applications in a wide variety of problems of academic and industrial interest. Recent developments in actuation technologies and computational/experimental methods, along with the re-booming of machine learning techniques, have made it possible for AFC to be more efficient, robust, and intelligent. In 2021 and 2023, we proposed two Special Issues to showcase and discuss new advances in AFC. Eleven and twelve excellent papers were collected respectively that pushed the boundaries of this research area, both in fundamentals and in applications. Following its success, we would like to continue the efforts here by calling for the third edition of this Special Issue. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Design and development of novel actuators for AFC;
  • Theoretical/computational/experimental studies on AFC;
  • New control strategies in AFC;
  • Machine-learning-guided AFC;
  • New AFC applications.

Prof. Dr. Hui Tang
Prof. Dr. Xin Wen
Dr. Feng Ren
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • active flow control
  • sensors and actuators
  • control of flow instability
  • flow separation control
  • mixing control
  • turbulence control
  • flow-induced vibration control
  • aeroacoustics control

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

24 pages, 6389 KiB  
Article
Local Heat Transfer Analysis of Dual Sweeping Jet, Double Sweeping Jets, and Double Circular Jets Impinging at a Flat Surface
by Muhammad Zubair, Feng Ren and Xin Wen
Actuators 2025, 14(3), 109; https://doi.org/10.3390/act14030109 - 21 Feb 2025
Viewed by 417
Abstract
A sweeping jet is commonly preferred over a steady jet owing to its ability to better cool the region away from the strong core of an impinging jet. For industrial applications, it is important to study the thermal fields of oscillating jets in [...] Read more.
A sweeping jet is commonly preferred over a steady jet owing to its ability to better cool the region away from the strong core of an impinging jet. For industrial applications, it is important to study the thermal fields of oscillating jets in a multi-jet configuration to focus on the region that falls between the two consecutive fluidic oscillators and, hence, suggest a mechanism to uniformly cool the targeted flat surface. A comparative experimental study of dual sweeping jets (DSJs), double sweeping jets (DbSJs), and double circular jets (DbCJs) was conducted at different jet-to-plate spacings, various Re numbers, and three aspect ratios. The multi-circular and sweeping jets were impinged on a flat hot surface, which was heated at a constant flux of current, and thermocouples were employed to efficiently collect the time-averaged heat transfer distribution along the sweeping and transverse directions. It was determined that heat transfer, in terms of the Nusselt number, generally increased with increasing Re number and reduced the jet-to-wall spacing for the DSJ, DbSJ, and DbCJ, with some minor exceptions. The relative performance of these fluidic devices suggested that the best performance of DSJ was at small spacing and higher Re, DbSJ at moderate spacing and lower Re, and DbCJ at moderate spacing and moderate Re. The mutual comparison showed that along the sweeping motion, in the central region, DbCJ was better than both DSJ and DbSJ; in the right region, DSJ performance was far better than DbCJ and DbSJ; in the left region, DSJ was better than DbSJ when comparing the respective centers of DSJ and DbSJ. The dominance of DSJ over DbSJ at the centers of their respective bodies even extends in the transverse direction. Finally, for higher aspect ratios, the DSJ performed better in the outer regions, while the DbSJ performed well in the central region. Similarly, for both DSJ and DbSJ unanimously, the effect of changing the aspect ratio is interesting as initially, the Nu values increase for a higher aspect ratio, but by increasing the AR further, it causes a divergence of the fluidic volume from the central region to the surrounding region. Full article
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23 pages, 8016 KiB  
Article
Flow Characteristics of a Dual Sweeping Jet Impinging on a Flat Surface
by Muhammad Zubair and Xin Wen
Actuators 2025, 14(2), 101; https://doi.org/10.3390/act14020101 - 19 Feb 2025
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 385
Abstract
The dual sweeping jet (DSJ)-producing fluidic oscillator is a novel device developed by sharing a feedback channel between two standard fluidic oscillators. This device produces a pair of sweeping jets in the outer domain and has the potential to be used for the [...] Read more.
The dual sweeping jet (DSJ)-producing fluidic oscillator is a novel device developed by sharing a feedback channel between two standard fluidic oscillators. This device produces a pair of sweeping jets in the outer domain and has the potential to be used for the better and uniform treatment of impinged surfaces. Therefore, it is important to investigate the extent of the synchronicity of these jets at different Re numbers and various aspect ratios in outer domains, and to comprehend their internal switching mechanism simultaneously. The time-averaged flow fields demonstrated that, at lower Re numbers, both sweeping jets were symmetric about their centerlines and the cores were strong. The strength of the cores deteriorated at higher Re numbers, and the flare regions became wider and stronger. Moreover, the transverse velocities pulled the sweeping jets away from the origin and a high upwash flow formed in-between the jets. The phase-averaged flow fields vividly illustrated the sharing mechanism between the two power nozzles through the formation of left- and right-loops consecutively in the shared feedback channel. These primary loops generated an auxiliary mechanism on both sides of a fluidic oscillator, which actually controlled the synchronicity of the two sweeping jets in the outer domain. Additionally, they also showed that both jets are properly synchronized and have strong cores at lower Re numbers. However, at higher Re numbers, greater velocities were found in the switching and sweeping mechanisms which caused asynchrony between the sweeping jets but nonetheless impinged a larger area and covered the region in-between the jets properly. The power nozzles were also found to self-feed themselves due to the hindrance at the ‘outer shoulders’ of this fluidic oscillator and hence caused the premature formation of a recirculation bubble of vorticity between the power nozzle and its respective outer island. Lastly, the aspect ratio analysis revealed that the asynchrony of DSJ at higher Re numbers can be mitigated by reducing the aspect ratio. Full article
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