Turbulent drag reduction by spanwise slot blowing pulsed plasma actuation

This work studies the turbulent drag reduction (TDR) effect of a flat plate model using a spanwise slot blowing pulsed plasma actuator (SBP-PA). Wind tunnel experiments are carried out under a Reynolds number of 1.445 × 10⁴. Using a hot-wire anemometer and an electrical data acquisition system, the influences of millisecond pulsed plasma actuation with different burst frequencies and duty cycles on the microscale coherent structures near the wall of the turbulent boundary layer (TBL) are studied. The experimental results show that the SBP-PA can effectively reduce the frictional drag of the TBL. When the duty cycle exceeds 30%, the TDR rate is greater than 11%, and the optimal drag reduction rate of 13.69% is obtained at a duty cycle of 50%. Furthermore, optimizing the electrical parameters reveals that increasing the burst frequency significantly reduces the velocity distribution in the logarithmic region of the TBL. When the normalized burst frequency reaches f⁺ = 2πf_pd/U_∞ = 7.196, the optimal TDR effectiveness is 16.97%, indicating a resonance phenomenon between the pulsed plasma actuation and the microscale coherent structures near the wall. Therefore, reasonably selecting the electrical parameters of the plasma actuator is expected to significantly improve the TDR effect.