The research activity considers different strategies of active flow control as continuous blowing or suction, synthetic jet manipulation.

Synthetic Jet (SJ) actuators are very compact devices that inject momentum into the fluid by a vibrating membrane or by piston based systems. Since the massflow injected into the fluid during a cycle is zero, these actuators are also called Zero Net Mass Transfer Systems (ZNMTS).
In Refs. [6][9] a reduced order model of SJ actuators for flow control simulations is proposed.

FIGURE 1:
Experimental investigation of control of the flow separation on a NACA0015 airfoil at high incidence by using synthetic jet manipulation. (a) Stalled Flow (b) Active control of separation.

FIGURE 2: Numerical simulation of active flow control on a NACA0015 airfoil at high incidence by using synthetic jet manipulation.

Unlike mechanical thrust-vectoring that use actuated hardware to vector the jet thrust, Fluid Thrust Vectoring (FTV) nozzles use a secondary jet to manipulate the primary air stream. Thrust vectoring in symmetric nozzles is obtained by secondary flow injections that cause local flow separations, asymmetric pressure distributions and, therefore, the vectoring of the primary jet thrust. We focused on the Dual-Throat Nozzle (DTN) concept, a 2-D nozzle with two geometric minimum areas. The injection slot is located at the upstream minimum area. The asymmetric injection of secondary flow forces the flow to separate. The sonic plane becomes skewed, thus vectoring the primary flow.

FIGURE 4: Numerical simulation of Fluidic Thrust Vectoring. (a) unmanipulated symmetric jet-stream, (b) manipulated deflected jet-stream.