High-Voltage High-Frequency Arbitrary Waveform Multilevel Generator for DBD Plasma Actuators

A high-voltage high-frequency single-phase arbitrary waveform voltage generator able to supply a wide range of plasma reactors is proposed in this paper. The generator structure is based on the cascaded H-bridge multilevel (ML) topology, including 24 H-bridge basic modules with the capability of 49 output voltage levels. The individual H-bridge dc supply (600 V) is provided by a flyback converter fed by a low-voltage (12 V) dc battery. This way, the input isolation of the ±14.4 kV maximum output voltage is realized in a simple and effective manner, and a portable device is obtained. The ML generator has been tested by supplying a dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) fluid-dynamic plasma actuator with different voltage waveforms, pointing out a wide and interesting set of results in terms of output plasma currents, and a first comparison has been carried out with respect to a conventional ac sinusoidal generator. A simplified circuit model has been introduced for the DBD plasma actuator, and the whole system has been numerically implemented by Simulink of MATLAB. The simulation results are in good agreement with the experiments.