Numerical investigation of electromagnetic characteristics of dielectric barrier discharge plasma actuators

This paper proposes the combination of plasma modeling based on fluid dynamics and two dimensional radar cross section (RCS) calculation. It opens to the possibility for analysis of electromagnetic characteristics of dielectric barirer discharge (DBD) plasma by providing the electron density distribution. The first part is dedicated to perform plasma modeling of four DBD actuators based on Suzen-Huang model in a static system. The resulted electron density is coupled with Maxwell-Boltzmann system in the next. In order to calculate RCS, the scattered fields are computed by finite-difference time-domain scheme. Consequently, the analysis of electromagnetic characteristics of DBD based on monostatic and bistatic RCS is performed. It shows the directional property in the RCS reduction caused by asymmetric electron density distribution. In addition, the amount of reduction dwindles as frequency increases due to the change of attenuation constant of plasma.