Paper presented at the 8th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Mauritius, 11-13 July, 2011.
Matched numerical and experimental studies are performed
in the framework of the developed flow-control concept based
on generation of small spanwise-regular disturbances. The idea
arose from the analysis of skin-flow interaction of high-speed
marine animals. In practice, flow regularity of a given scale is
introduced as a temperature boundary condition, T(z).
Experimentally, it is realized with spanwise arrays of thermal
sources, in particular, in a form of localized plasma discharges
generated in a field of microwave radiation. Measured
aerodynamic coefficients are shown to correlate with the
induced streamwise vortical structure of a boundary layer.