Abstract
Plasma actuator makes parallel flow on the wall surface by the interaction between plasma and neutral air particles. Dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma actuator is widely studied as one type of plasma actuators, which consists of one electrode exposed to the environmental gas and the other encapsulated by a dielectric material. This paper is experimentally focused on the performance of DBD plasma actuator mounted on a flat plate, which depends on kinds of the electrode materials, their thicknesses and the supplied voltage including its frequency. We measured the velocity magnitudes of the induced flow by a stagnation probe as a performance parameter of the plasma actuators. The velocity profiles of the flow induced by the plasma actuators are similar in all measurement cases. The magnitude of the induced velocity is strongly influenced by the thickness of the electrodes and the frequency of the input voltage. The performance of DBD plasma actuators is related to the electric properties of the electrode materials such as the ionization energy and the electrical resistivity.