Experimental Study of Blowing Direction Effects of DBD Plasma Actuator on Separation Control of Flow Around an Airfoil

An experimental study of plasma actuator on separation control is conducted. The plasma actuator is used for control of separated flow around NACA0015 airfoil. The Reynolds number based on chord length is set to 60,000 and the angle of attack is set to 12[deg]. The plasma actuator is applied with normal mode and burst mode, where normal mode denotes continuous actuation and burst mode denotes temporary intermittent actuation. Also, actuations for co-flow blowing and counter blowing are conducted. The averaged pressure coefficients of wing surface and velocity fields are measured. For velocity fields, PIV measurement is adopted. Comparing counter and co-flow blowings of plasma actuator, the effects of counter blowing is investigated. Also, for both co-flow and counter blowing cases, we investigate the effects of burst mode. Through the series of experiments, following two types of mechanism for separation control will be discussed. One type is considered to be directly giving momentum in the boundary layer which seems to be more active in co-flow blowing with normal mode. The other type is considered to be enhancement of the mixing, leading to increase in momentum thickness of the boundary layer. The latter mechanism seems to be active in the burst mode with both co-flow and counter blowing.