Experimental research on multichannel discharge circuit and multi-electrode plasma synthetic jet actuator

Abstract

To solve the low efficiency of plasma synthetic jet actuator (PSJA), a multichannel discharge technique based on the concept of voltage relay is put forward and a new multi-electrode plasma synthetic jet actuator (ME-PSJA) is designed. The experiment shows the multichannel discharge technique can enlarge the discharge channel distance by multiplying the discharge channel number without increasing the input voltage. With a 1 nF discharge capacitor, the discharge efficiency of three channels discharge increases by 135% compared with the standard one channel discharge. When the discharge capacitor increases to 0.3 μF, four discharge channels still improve the discharge efficiency by 119% as well. Schlieren flow visualization confirms that ME-PSJA also outperforms the 2-electrode PSJA in terms of jet velocity and duration time, and both are increased by about 50%.