Spanwise-Discontinuous Grooves for Separation Delay and Drag Reduction of Bodies with Vortex Shedding

Suitably shaped grooves, placed transverse to the flow, can delay flow separation over curved surfaces. When grooves are fully extruded in the spanwise direction, they may reduce the drag of boat-tailed bodies with vortex shedding, but with the drawback of increasing the spanwise correlation of the vortex shedding. We investigate herein the effect of spanwise-discontinuous grooves through Large Eddy Simulations. A systematic analysis is carried out on the effect of the number, N, of grooves that are present for N equally long portions of the total spanwise length of the boat-tail. Discontinuous grooves further reduce the drag compared with the full-spanwise-extruded groove. Increasing N produces an improvement of the flow-control-device performance, whose maximum value is reached for N = 3, corresponding to a spanwise extension of the groove roughly equal to the body crossflow dimension. Above this value, no further improvements are found. The maximum drag reduction is equal to 25.7% of the drag of the boat-tail without grooves and to 17.7% of the one of the boat-tail with the full-spanwise-extruded groove. The lowest drag value occurs for the least correlated vortex-shedding in the spanwise direction. The reduction in the correlation is mainly related to a flow separation line that is less regular in the spanwise direction.

Automated summary

Suitably shaped and strategically placed grooves can delay flow separation and reduce drag by improving the vortex-shedding behavior. Discontinuous grooves can provide even better drag reduction compared to fully extruded grooves, with the optimal performance achieved when the groove extends roughly equal to the body crossflow dimension.