Experimental and Numerical Study of Boundary Layer Transition Control Over an Airfoil Using a DBD Plasma Actuator

In this paper, the effects of Dielectric Barrier Discharge (DBD) actuation on the boundary layer transition have been studied on an ONERA-D airfoil both experimentally and numerically. The experiment has been conducted in a subsonic windtunnel for freestream velocities up to 24 m/s and for two different actuator locations. Hot-wire probing enabled to quantify the influence of the ionic wind on the boundary layer mean velocity profiles and on the resulting transition shifts. The maximum measured transition delay was about 6% of chord. These measurements served as references to establish a numerical model of the body force induced by a plasma actuator. Linear stability analysis is then applied to the mean flow induced by the body force model and compared to the measured mean velocity profiles.