Investigation of the effect of the plasma actuators in aerodynamic flow control applications

This study aims at investigating the applications AI and feedback control assisted plasma actuators based active flow control of selected airfoil types for improvement of aerodynamic performances. In aerial systems, the plasma actuators have been shown to achieve promising results for active flow control. In the first part of the study, aerodynamic performance of the NACA 2415 and NACA 0015 airfoils are investigated with the implementation of plasma actuator for flow control. In second part of the study, a feedback control method is implemented to achieve active control of the plasma actuators. Also, artificial neural network technique is utilized to estimate the experimental data related to lift and drag coefficients needed for the aerodynamic performance analysis. The experimental results of the first part indicate that the plasma actuators located at suction surface of the airfoils provide decrease in drag force, increase in lift force, shifting of stall angle, performance enhancement of the airfoils and reduction of the wake width of the airfoils. The experimental results of the second part show that developed Artificial Neural Network model is successful in estimation of lift and drag coefficients. In addition, the study on feedback control algorithm to control the flow around the airfoils with the plasma actuators as an active flow control with a feedback controller has proven to have considerable benefits.