Investigation of Airfoil Flow Separation Control by Dielectric Barrier Discharge Plasma Actuators

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Ye, Zhixian Zou, Jian-Feng Zheng, Yao
Copyright Year	2019
Abstract	The performance of dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma actuators on controlling the flow separation of NACA0015 airfoil was investigated in a low-turbulence and low-speed wind tunnel. The smoke flow visualization was applied to reflect the modification of the flow over the airfoil controlled by the plasma actuators. Lift and drag were measured by the pressure distribution on airfoil surface with electronic pressure scanners to investigate the separation control effect of the pulse frequency and actuator position. The results show that the plasma actuators can effectively suppress the flow separation and make the flow reattach to the surface. The plasma actuation increases the angle of the attack of the flow reattachment by 5° at the free-stream velocity of 15m/s. With the same input power of the plasma actuators, the flow control effect will be better when the actuator pulse frequency increases. Introduction As an important branch of aerodynamics, flow control is to change the flow field structure to make the flow develop in a desired direction, such as controlling the turbulent transition, changing the turbulence and controlling the flow separation. In addition to reducing drag and increasing lift of the aircraft, the flow control has great application potential in reducing chattering, reducing noise, improving maneuverability and engine inner flow control . The passive flow control methods such as wing fence and vortex generators are pre-set., and the desired control effect cannot be achieved when the actual flow deviates from the designed states, so it is difficult to make a breakthrough in improving the flight efficiency and performance of the aircraft. Active flow control, including micro-jet , synthetic jet [3] and plasma actuation, inputs a small amount of energy in the local area to generate appropriate disturbances in boundary layer to achieve the local and global flow field control. And with the development of the micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS), the active control can sense and predict the change of flow state, and adjust the control behavior in real time as the flow field state changes . So the active flow control has become an important research field in fluid mechanics study . Plasma flow control, which has the advantages of less input energy, light structure and flexible control, has received much attention in recent years. The dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma is the common one and a DBD plasma actuator consists of two parallel electrodes that are located on the surface separated by the insulating layer. A high-frequency and high-voltage alternating current is supplied to the electrodes to generate ionized air (plasma), then the plasma moving in the electric field produced by the parallel electrodes results in the jet parallel to the surface. In this way, the DBD plasma actuators can effectively change the flow field structures of the boundary layer to control boundary layer separation and transition and increase the lift and decrease the drag in the meantime . In recent years, there are a lot of researches focusing on plasma control, such as the boundary layer control , flow separation control , turbine cascade separation control [11] and so on. Malik M et al. [12] firstly used the corona discharge to control the boundary layer flow of the plate. The drag of the plate can be reduced by 20% when the driving voltage is 15kV with the free-stream velocity of 30m/s. Patrick Nguyen Huu et al. found that the actuators could create vortex and increase the lift up to 10% when the free-stream velocity is 20m/s. Roth J R et al. placed the DBD plasma actuator array on the flexible polyimide plate to control the flow separation of the NACA0015
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
DOI	10.12783/dtcse/icaic2019/29465
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://dpi-proceedings.com/index.php/dtcse/article/viewFile/29465/28445
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://doi.org/10.12783/dtcse%2Ficaic2019%2F29465
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article