Characteristics of a dielectric barrier discharge plasma actuator driven by pulsed-DC high voltage

Abstract

Dielectric barrier discharge using pulsed-DC high voltage (pulsed-DC DBD) have been proven to be capable of effectively reducing skin friction drag in turbulent boundary layers with limited power consumption, thus producing significant net power savings. In this work, the characteristics of pulsed-DC DBD, including power consumption, induced flow structure, thermal effect, and body force, are investigated sequentially. Both the power consumption and pressure waves produced by pulsed-DC DBD are similar to that of DBD using nanosecond pulses (ns-DBD), whereas the wall-bounded jet structure resembles that of DBD using sinusoidal high voltage (ac-DBD). A curved wall jet is induced at a small pulse width, which turns into a straight one due to the combined effect of momentum and thermal addition when the pulse width increases. With increasing pulse width, the induced body force goes up while the thermal effect weakens. Although pulse frequency has no impact on the wall-bounded jet topology, the body force increases with pulse frequency because of the enhanced energy entrainment. With these results, four parameters that affect the performance of pulsed-DC DBD are extracted, including the pulse leading edge, pulse width, frequency, and amplitude, which lays the foundation for the optimization of pulsed-DC DBD.