Effects of plasma kinetic modeling on performance characterization of plasma actuators for active flow control

Abstract

This work focuses on the development of a multiscale computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation framework for the investigation of the effects of plasma kinetics on the performance of a microscale dielectric barrier discharge plasma actuator (DBD-PA). To this purpose, DBD-PA multi-scale dual-step modelling approach has been implemented, by considering plasma chemistry and flow dynamic. At first, a microscopic plasma model based on the air plasma kinetics has been defined and plasma reactions have been simulated in zero-dimensional computations in order to evaluate the charge density. At this aim computations have been performed using the toolbox ZDPlasKin, which solves plasma reactions by means of Bolsig+ solver. An alternate current (AC) electrical feeding has been assumed: in particular, the sinusoidal voltage amplitude and the frequency have been fixed at 5 kV and 1 kHz at atmospheric pressure and 300 K temperature in quiescent environment. The predictal charge density has been in a macroscopic plasma-fluid model based on Suzen Dual Potential Model (DPM), which has implemented in the computation fluid dynamic CFD code OpenFoam. Hence, as second step, 2D-CFD simulations of the electro-hydrodynamic body forces induced by the microscale DBDPA have been performed, based on the previously predicted charge densities at the operating conditions. Quiescent flow over a dielectric barrier discharge actuator has been simulated using the plasma-fluid model. The novel modelling framework has been validated with experimental data.