Development of a Comprehensive Model for Plasma Actuation in 3D-RANS-Simulations

Abstract

Being a comparably new technology, plasma actuation as a method to influence the flow in turbomachines has been investigated with a lot of effort in the past few years. Most of these investigations related to turbomachinery applications were carried out numerically using extensions to various RANS-codes and showed rather good improvements of the flow, particularly when using plasma actuators to suppress separations. Although most of these works gave a good impression of the capabilities of plasma actuators a comprehensive model of plasma actuation accounting for the impact of local static pressure, local temperature and the velocity of the flow passing the actuator was not presented yet. In this paper an extension to the proven and well validated RANS CFD code TRACE is presented which is able to model the influence of plasma actuation dependent on the local flow properties, i.e. dependent on the local static pressure, static temperature and Mach-number. This model extends the work of Lemire et al. [1] in a way that a comprehensive calibration based on open data is possible. In this paper, first the calibration is described followed by a validation in order to ensure that the model works correctly under different boundary conditions. The work is concluded by performing a numerical study applying a plasma actuator on different stator vanes along a generic high pressure compressor. Using this example the benefits of the extension to Lemire et al. [1], featuring the calibration for local static pressure, static temperature and Mach-number is explained and their impact on the potential of plasma actuation to suppress trailing edge separations is discussed.