Experimental Study of the Unsteady Actuation Effect on Induced Flow Characteristics in DBD Plasma Actuators

The main aim of this paper is to investigate unsteady actuation effects on the operation of dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma actuators and to study induced flow characteristics of steady and unsteady actuators in quiescent air. The parameters affecting the operation of unsteady plasma actuators were experimentally measured and compared with the ones for steady actuators. The effects of excitation frequency and duty cycle on the induced flow pattern properties were studied by means of hot-wire anemometers, and the smoke visualization method was also used. It was observed that the current and the mean induced velocity linearly increase with increasing duty cycle while they are not sensitive to excitation frequency. Furthermore, with increasing excitation frequency, the magnitude of vortices shedding from the actuator decreases while their frequency increases. Nevertheless, when the excitation frequency grows beyond a certain level, the induced flow downstream of the actuator behaves as a steady flow. However, the results for steady actuators show that by increasing the applied voltage and carrier frequency, the velocity of the induced flow first increases and then decreases with actuator saturation and the onset of the emission of streaky glow discharge.