Development of Fully Covered Plasma Actuator

Recently, a plasma actuator has been attracting attention due to the growing interest in dynamic fluid control technology. While the plasma actuator has no moving parts and enables highly responsive airflow control, it has not yet been put into practical use due to the low induced flow velocity and durability of the materials. In particular, with regard to the durability of the materials, it is known that exposed electrodes are easy to corrode during discharge. In addition, the thickness of the exposed electrodes may cause unexpected disturbances in the flow field. In this study, we propose a fully covered plasma actuator consisting of only covered electrodes by using a coplanar dielectric barrier discharge. The proposed plasma actuator consists of three electrodes; two electrodes upstream generate charged particles, and another electrode downstream accelerates the charged particles. The induced flow velocity was measured by particle image velocimetry, and it was confirmed that the fully covered plasma actuator can generate an equivalent flow to that driven by a conventional plasma actuator with exposed electrode. The measurements also suggest that the performance can be drastically improved by controlling the surface charge on the actuator.