The potential of controlling shockwave-boundary layer interactions （SWBLIs） in air by plasma aerodynamic actua- tion is demonstrated. Experiments are conducted in a Mach 3 in-draft air tunnel. The separation-inducing shock is generated with a diamond-shaped shockwave generator located on the wall opposite to the surface electrodes, and the flow properties are studied with schlieren imaging and static wall pressure probes. The measurements show that the separation phenomenon is weakened with the plasma aerodynamic actuation, which is observed to have significant control authority over the inter- action. The main effect is the displacement of the reflected shock. Perturbations of incident and reflected oblique shocks interacting with the separation bubble in a rectangular cross section supersonic test section are produced by the plasma actuation. This interaction results in a reduction of the separation bubble size, as detected by phase-lock schlieren images. The measured static wall pressure also shows that the separation-inducing shock is restrained. Our results suggest that the boundary layer separation control through heating is the primary control mechanism.
The plasma synthetic jet is a novel active flow control method because of advantages such as fast response, high frequency and non-moving parts, and it has received more attention recently, especially regarding its application to high-speed flow control. In this paper, the experimental characterization of the plasma synthetic jet actuator is investigated. The actuator consists of a copper anode, a tungsten cathode and a ceramic shell, and with these three parts a cavity can be formed inside the actuator. A pulsed-DC power supply was adopted to generate the arc plasma between the electrodes, through which the gas inside was heated and expanded from the orifice. Discharge parameters such as voltage and current were recorded, respectively, by voltage and current probes. The schlieren system was used for flow visualization, and jet velocities with different discharge parameters were measured. The schlieren images showed that the strength of plasma jets in a series of pulses varies from each other. Through velocity measurement, it is found that at a fixed frequency, the jet velocity hardly increases when the discharge voltage ranges from 16 kV to 20 kV. However, with the discharge voltage fixed, the jet velocity suddenly decreases when the pulse frequency rises above 500 Hz, whereas at other testing frequencies no such decrease was observed. The maximum jet velocity measured in the experiment was up to 110 m/s, which is believed to be effective for high-speed flow control.
The shockwave induced by surface direct-current （DC） arc discharge is investigated both experimentally and numer- ically. In the experiment, the shockwave generated by rapid gas heating is clearly observed from Schlieren images. The peak velocity of the shockwave is measured to be over 410 m/s; during its upright movement, it gradually falls to about 340 m/s; no remarkable difference is seen after changing the discharge voltage and the pulse frequency. In the modeling of the arc plasma, the arc domain is not simulated as a boundary condition with fixed temperature or pressure, but a source term with a time-varying input power density, which could better reflect the influence of the heating process. It is found that with a reference power density of 2.8× 1012 W/m2, the calculated peak velocity is higher than the measured one, but they quickly （in 30 Its） become agreed with each other. The peak velocity also rises while increasing the power density, the maximum velocity acquired in the simulation is over 468 m/s, which is expected to be effective for high speed flow control.
