Analysis of Innovative Plasma Actuator Geometries for Boundary Layer Control

Active flow control by plasma actuators is a topic of great interest by worldwide scientific community. These devices are mainly used for boundary layer control in order to improve the aerodynamic performance of aerial vehicles. Plasma actuators are simple devices that produces a wall bounded jet which allow to control the adjacent flow without moving mechanical parts. Recently, new geometries have been proposed by different authors in an attempt to improve the performance of these devices. In this work, some of these new configurations will be studied and compared considering its ability for boundary layer control applications. Dielectric Barrier Discharge (DBD) plasma actuator, Plasma Synthetic Jet (PSJ) actuator, Multiple Encapsulated Electrodes (MEE) plasma actuator and Curved plasma actuator (or 3D plasma actuator) will be experimentally studied in this work. Plasma actuators power consumption was measured by two different experimental methods. Results for power consumption and power losses of different plasma actuators geometries were presented and discussed.