Study on the Actuation Characteristics of Microsecond Pulse Sliding Discharge Plasma

The plasma flow control devices include plasma actuators (PAs) and plasma power supplies. Based on the principle of capacitive charging and discharging, this article independently developed a microsecond pulse plasma power supply (MPPS). At the same time, based on the traditional dielectric barrier discharge PA (DBD-PA) configuration, an exposed electrode was added to form a three-electrode sliding discharge PA (TSD-PA), which can effectively increase the plasma discharge area and improve the effect of flow control. In this article, three aspects of electrical, temperature, and aerodynamic characteristics are studied experimentally. The experimental results show that the maximum time-averaged power of the microsecond pulse sliding discharge is less than 1 W, but the instantaneous power can reach up to 14.16 kW. When the actuator is working, due to the thermal effect caused by the collision between plasma particles, the temperature of the discharge area increases sharply, and the maximum working temperature reaches 51.4 °C. In addition, the microsecond pulse superimposed on dc voltage of different polarities generates different induced flow structures. A “cavity” structure is also found in the flow field, and it may be due to the strong adsorption effect of the dc electrode on the charge, resulting in a large amount of charge accumulation.