This Master thesis concerns the use of dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma actuators in supersonic environments and investigates if there is a practical possibility of using these actuators for drag reduction or attitude control. By employing the actuators in the low pressure wake aft of a body travelling at supersonic velocities, or two actuators facing different directions around the body’s center of mass respectively. This was investigated by the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with the software iCFD++. The DBD actuators were approximated within the software as a body force acting on the flow surrounding a body. This body force was based on a pre-existing model. Experimental and theoretical data was fitted to this model and validated through separate simulations. Two different cases were simulated with different geometrical configurations of the body as to provide results from cases with different local conditions for the actuators. The results were then compared to simulation results of inert bodies under otherwise identical conditions.

For the application of drag reduction on the used body the simulations showed a very minor increase in drag instead of a decrease, on the order of 0.1mN to 100mN for the drag force or 10⁻⁸ to 10⁻⁵ for the drag coefficient. This is believed to be caused by interactions with the boundary layer which could be overcome with higher performing actuators. For the use in attitude control it was determined that the actuators could provide a maximum angular acceleration of 2.59mrad/s² for the example body used. These results indicate that the use of DBD actuators for these purposes in this type of environment is of little practical use. Should a great increase in performance of the actuators be possible however, this could be re-evaluated.