First Post! Plasma Actuators are ~evil~

To be completely honest, I have no idea if anyone will end up reading this blog. I sincerely hope so, and I plan to keep posting regardless, but I guess time will tell if y'all are enraptured, turned off, or indifferent.

In any case, welcome to the jungle.

In proper blog form, I'd like to start off by making a complaint: plasma actuators are too cool to be as... limited (read: useless) as they are.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the term, a plasma actuator is essentially a way to generate a small amount of ionized gas by creating a massive voltage differential between two conductive materials separated by a dielectric. The small amount of plasma this generates has an effect on the airflow around it, meaning that you could (theoretically) use an array of these actuators to selectively increase or decrease lift on part of an aircraft, rocket, semi truck, etc.

Sounds great so far. No moving parts, a beautiful purple glow, what's not to love?

Plasma actuator in operation. Source: NovaNext

The operative issue is as depressing as it is simple: they require too much juice.

Now don't get me wrong, plasma actuators have tremendous potential in fields like preventing flow separation, preventing instability, recovering from stalls, etc, but at the core, I'm disappointed on a fundamental level by their near uselessness as primary control surfaces.

Don't believe me? Take a look at this paper which investigated the feasibility of plasma actuators to maintain the trim on a small UAV.

For those of you who don't feel like reading, a 3kg UAV would require 54.6 kW of power to maintain trim at its maximum cruise speed.

FIFTY FOUR KILOWATTS! Doing some back of the napkin math on the average monthly power consumption of a US home (897 kW-H/month), that gives us an average home power consumption of 1.3 kW. Play the math out and you arrive at a shocking conclusion:

You could either:

1. Power 41 homes simultaneously

2. Maintain pitch on a UAV that weighs as much as a small dog

This is absolutely NUTS. Yes, it's physics, yes it's a fact that current plasma actuators don't generate a lot of thrust. However, as a dreamer and someone who's seen a lot of spaceships fly using purple glowy things (looking at you, Jem'Hadar), it physically pains me to have to shut the door on plasma actuators as an attitude control system for the Eureka-1 rocket. It would have been really cool to see that purple glow.

Speaking of purple glow...