Energy conversion analysis of ion wind in surface dielectric barrier discharge at low pressure

Ionic wind actuators are widely used in temperature control, food drying, aircraft propulsion, combustion, air purification, and many other fields. The energy conversion efficiency of ion-wind actuator has been low for a long time. In this paper, a lumped parameter circuit model is established for the surface dielectric barrier discharge structure, and the energy conversion path in the discharge process is proposed for the first time. According to the circuit topology, part of the energy loss is calculated. Based on the mathematical calculations of the circuit model, we discovered the possibility of “negative capacitance effect” in the plasma area, and the experimental verified the correctness of the theoretical deduction and prediction. Meanwhile, the results show that the equivalent capacitance of the solid dielectric is equal to the bottom slope of Lissajous graph, and the negative capacitance effect can effectively reduce the proportion of solid dielectric loss and relaxed polarization loss. The negative capacitance effect improves the energy conversion efficiency of the ionic wind exciter, and the maximum increase ratio is about 47.8%. With the increase of voltage, the deviation between the calculated value of theoretical model and the measured value increases gradually, and finally stabilizes at about 41%.