Seminars

Plasma actuators are a promising way to achieve aerodynamic flow control:  the energy of the plasma can be transferred to the gas as momentum or heat, leading to a manipulation of the initial flow's properties. The multi-scale physics involved though in such actuators and the complex interaction between them, makes their optimization process slow. Where experiments "fail", numerical simulations can provide detailed information of their operational regimes and/or basic physical insights. Three families of plasma actuators are of interest here: Microwave discharges, sparkjets and DBDs. Advanced, coupled numerical methods have been developed in order to deal with these multi-physics multi-scale simulations and numerical results of studies on these actuators will be presented. The talk will be focused on microwave discharges and streamer formation-propagation under microwave fields, making a link to our current research on plasma metamaterials.