Investigation of heat and mass transfer of flow structures generated by a pulsed surface arc discharge actuator in quiescent air

Abstract

Pulsed Surface Arc Discharge (PSAD) actuators can improve the aerodynamic performance of aircraft due to their fast response speed and wide frequency band. Understanding the flow structure induced by arc discharge and its transfer process is the key to the sensible use of plasma excitation for flow control. This paper has investigated the dynamic heat and mass transfer process of charged particle clusters generated by arc discharge theoretically and experimentally. The results show that the clusters are composed of charged particles, and the thermal effect is the macroscopic manifestation of the thermal motion of charged particles. The heat and mass transfer processes of charged particle clusters can be expressed as a function of temperature. During heat and mass transfer, the transfer mode of the plasma cluster composed of charged particles will change. The plasma cluster will change from forced convection in the initial stage to natural convection in the final stage, and the Richardson number is different in different stages. The heat released by the gas discharge and the heat released by the plasma mass transfer will form accumulated heat in the space and change the temperature difference, thereby affecting the process of heat and mass transfer. This paper has constructed a model describing pulsed plasma clusters' dynamic heat and mass transfer. Furthermore, the dynamic mode decomposition results of the theoretical model function show that plasma clusters mainly conduct the mass transfer through low-frequency and heat transfer through high-frequency modes.