Plasma Actuators for Active Flow Control in Aerospace Systems
A special issue of Actuators (ISSN 2076-0825). This special issue belongs to the section "Aerospace Actuators".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 28 February 2026 | Viewed by 49
Special Issue Editor
Interests: dielectric barrier discharge; plasma actuators; active flow control; micro-nanofluidics; electric propulsion; plasma-based sterilization; computational gas dynamics
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Over the past three decades, surface plasma actuators have garnered significant attention both in scientific research and in a broad range of practical applications. They can be useful in controlling flow separation to improve aerodynamic performance and lift-to-drag ratio, and reduce turbulent drag and vortex-induced noise. These actuators can be surface compliant, flexible, fast response, and reliable. At the heart of these actuators is a set of electrodes separated by a sufficient potential difference across a suitable dielectric medium to produce reactive species, including short-lived metastables and charged particles. The electrode geometry can be serpentine to induce three-dimensional tunable vortices, which may be used to actively control boundary layer flows by manipulating the dominant flow frequency, and/or introducing distributed roughness on the receptive bounding surface. This special collection of papers will cover key findings, advancements, and challenges of this plasma actuator technology in active flow control in aerospace applications. Discussion on realizable performance limitations of the actuators under adverse ambient conditions will also be included. Also, with recent advancements of AI and physics-informed neural network (PINN), the design simulation of these actuators has become a reality for a wide range of active control use cases, which will be of interest for this special issue.
Prof. Dr. Subrata Roy
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- plasma actuators
- linear and serpentine designs
- aerospace applications
- active flow control
- feed-back loop
- AI/PINN models
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