A Calibrated Lumped Element Model for the Prediction of PSJ Actuator Efficiency Performance

Among the various active flow control techniques, Plasma Synthetic Jet (PSJ) actuators, or Sparkjets, represent a very promising technology, especially because of their high velocities and short response times. A practical tool, employed for design and manufacturing purposes, consists of the definition of a low-order model, lumped element model (LEM), which is able to predict the dynamic response of the actuator in a relatively quick way and with reasonable fidelity and accuracy. After a brief description of an innovative lumped model, this work faces the experimental investigation of a home-designed and manufactured PSJ actuator, for different frequencies and energy discharges. Particular attention has been taken in the power supply system design. A specific home-made Pitot tube has allowed the detection of velocity profiles along the jet radial direction, for various energy discharges, as well as the tuning of the lumped model with experimental data, where the total device efficiency has been assumed as a fitting parameter. The best fitting value not only contains information on the actual device efficiency, but includes some modeling and experimental uncertainties, related also to the used measurement technique