Drag reduction of wall bounded incompressible turbulent flow based on active dimples/pimples

The control of turbulence by dimples/pimples has drawn more and more attention. The objective of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of the active dimples/pimples for the drag reduction in the incompressible turbulent flow. Firstly, the drag reduction by the opposition control based on active dimples/pimples at the lower wall is studied via the direct numerical simulation of the turbulent channel flow. It is found that large active dimples/pimples can not suppress the streamwise vortices significantly and thus almost no drag reduction is achieved. Small active dimples and pimples with the diameter of one fourth of the streak width can both reduce the friction drag, but pimples will induce a larger pressure drag than dimples. Then the suboptimal control scheme is examined based on small active dimples using the spanwise wall shear information only. It is shown that the friction drag decreases by about 4.5% but the total drag is only reduced by about 2.7% abated by the pressure drag. Compared with the actuation of the all-point blowing/suction or the all-point wall movement, the effectiveness of the turbulent drag reduction based on active shallow dimples is much smaller.