Performance improvement of dielectric barrier discharge plasma actuator with two-stroke cycle operation

Electrical and mechanical characteristics of a dielectric-barrier-discharge (DBD) plasma actuator driven by two-stroke cycle operation were experimentally investigated to obtain an insight into the performance improvement of ionic wind generation. The DC-biased repetitive pulses obtained by a DC power supply and SiC-MOSFETs are applied to the DBD plasma actuator for charged particle generation. The other DC voltage is applied to a downstream exposed electrode for the charged particle acceleration. The particle image velocimetry measurement reveals that the amplitude of the DC voltage used for charged particle generation has a small impact on the wall jet generation in this study. Contrary to this, the DC voltage used for charged particle acceleration increases both the peak velocity and thickness of the wall jet. Although the increment rate of the thrust generated by the DBD plasma actuator to the amplitude of DC voltage becomes lower when the distance between the exposed electrodes becomes larger, the threshold value of the spark discharge becomes large. As a result, the maximum value of the thrust for the case of the long distance between the electrodes is larger than that of the shorter distance case.