Parametric studies of an electrohydrodynamic plasma actuator for boundary layer flow control

An electrohydrodynamic plasma actuator can be used as an aerodynamic flow control device. A plasma actuator is realised as a surface-mounted dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) that transfers directed energy from ions in the discharge to the surrounding air. Parametric studies have been performed in order to investigate the relative efficiency in terms of electrical power into the actuator versus mechanical power in the generated boundary flow. The parametric study includes variations of the applied driving voltage and frequency as well as different electrode and dielectric materials. It is found that, within the range tested, for each value of electrical power into the actuator there exists an optimum driving frequency in terms of boundary layer flow velocity. It is also found that the same trend seems to be true when analyzing electric to mechanical efficiency of the device, i.e. for a given input power there exists an optimum driving frequency that produces the highest efficiency. However, this peak in efficiency of the actuator lies on the edge of the parametric space tested so that further experiments are needed to validate these results.