Go With the CoFlow Jet

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation 1 Comment

Ge-Cheng Zha, Professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department of the University of Miami (Florida) explores new realms of augmenting lift on wing surfaces.  He recently presented one aspect of this study, which he calls the CoFlow Jet. Most conventional airfoils generate increasing amounts of lift with an increasing angle of attack, but that increase stops at around 12 to 15 degrees AOA.  The wing “stalls”, sometimes suddenly.  The ability to avoid this stall would increase flight safety immeasurably. Zha’s presentation at SAS 2019 at UC Berkeley, “A High Efficiency Low Noise VTOL/ESTOL Concept Using CoFlow Jet,” showed off some startling high angle of attack capabilities that went well beyond the normal limits for conventional airfoils. Phil Hendrie, a comedian with a radio and now podcast career, defined the worst possible circumstance as something that sucks and blows at the same time.  The antithesis to that is the CoFlow Jet (CFJ), offering an “active flow control airfoil.”  Described as, …