Design And Control Of Plasma Actuated Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)

Unmanned aerial vehicles has been significantly gaining national and international interest recently. Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi has been recently approved by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as one of the six fully operational test site for unmanned vehicles in the United States in order to seamlessly integrate all UAS operations into the national airspace. The Unmanned aerial vehicles has been attracting researchers, industries and consumers for varied applications. Controlling the airflows over an airfoil or other aerodynamic surfaces for separation control and drag reduction are of significant interest to Airforce. The planar or surface plasmas have shown to have a significant effect on the drag reduction especially at high angle of incidences. The use of surface plasmas generated using plasma actuators on medium to large aerial vehicles has been of interest to the plasma actuator research community and has been widely researched. However, in the case of unmanned aerial vehicles that are usually small and light in weight and they do not have significant payload capacity. Contrarily, the power supply required to generate high-frequency high-voltage signal to create uniform surface plasmas in the plasma actuators are usually bulky and heavy, making it not suitable for the UAV application. The weight of the plasma power supply has been the limiting factor for the plasma actuator application on UAVs. Our research group has been developing a method to develop a light weight highfrequency high-voltage power supply and incorporate it in a plasma actuator on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In this work we will present the results of the plasma actuator performance and the performance of the UAV controlled with default servo motor based controls and plasma actuated control dynamics, mechanisms and efficiencies.