Electromechanical Characteristics of Wall-Normal Momentum Injection with Axisymmetric Dielectric Barrier Discharge Plasma Actuators

Over the last decade, the electrohydrodynamic (EHD) interaction produced by dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) actuators has seen strong interest for active flow control applications. Plasma synthetic-jet actuators (PSJAs) are DBD jets capable of producing zero-net mass flux momentum injection through ionic interactions in air at atmospheric pressure. These devices are of particular interest due to their rapid response time, lack of moving parts, variety of tunable parameters, and repeatably demonstrated efficacy in boundary layer modulation under a range of flow conditions. Due to the edge-normal momentum injection characteristics of PSJAs, previous studies naturally focused on surface wall jet configurations with spanwise cartesian geometries (see straight-edge, serrated, fingered electrodes) in quiescent, co-, counter-, and cross flow external conditions.