Research

Making plasma actuators predictable

Surface dielectric barrier discharge actuators inject momentum into a flow with no moving parts and almost no lag. The obstacle to using them is not novelty — it is that their performance has been established one experiment at a time. My work is about replacing that with measured limits and models you can design against.

01 Dissertation

The question

Working title

Advanced Design and Characterization of Atmospheric Surface Dielectric Barrier Discharge Actuators

The dissertation asks how four design levers — actuator geometry, dielectric properties, voltage, and frequency — determine what a surface discharge actually does: when it ignites, when it saturates, how it draws current, and how much force it produces.

Individually those relationships are known in fragments. Assembled across geometries, materials, and drive conditions, they become something more useful: operating maps and predictive models that let a designer choose an actuator for a flow problem instead of building six and testing them all.

The work is carried out in the UW Department of Mechanical Engineering, advised by Associate Research Professor Igor Novosselov.

  • Ignition & saturation limits
  • Electrical characterisation
  • Direct thrust measurement
  • Empirical & reduced-order modelling

02 Threads

What the experiments look at

Thread i

Momentum injection into co-flow and counter-flow

A quiescent-air jet tells you what an actuator can do. A boundary layer tells you what it will do. This thread measures momentum injection against an external freestream in both directions — actuation with the flow, and against it.

In co-flow the boundary layer thins. In counter-flow the actuator can drive separation outright, with the momentum displacement substantially exceeding the jet's momentum in still air. Both effects fall off as freestream velocity rises, which is precisely the trade a designer needs quantified rather than described.

J. Electrostatics, 2024

An instrumented airfoil test article mounted vertically in a 3-by-3-foot wind-tunnel test section.
Airfoil test article installed in the UW Aerodynamics Lab 3′ × 3′ wind tunnel.
A glass discharge tube on the bench glowing violet-white where the plasma has ignited.
An atmospheric discharge running on the bench — the working end of every measurement.

Thread ii

Plasma synthetic jets and wall-normal thrust

An axisymmetric plasma synthetic jet actuator pairs a circular embedded electrode with an exposed ring electrode. The annular discharge drives a converging wall jet that collides on the axis and turns, producing wall-normal momentum with zero net mass flux, no plenum, and no moving parts.

I characterise these devices parametrically — electrode geometry, dielectric, voltage, and frequency — with simultaneous electrical measurement and direct thrust measurement, so the force produced can be tied back to the power actually deposited in the discharge.

IJPEST, 2025 AIAA SciTech, 2025

Thread iii

Operating maps instead of data points

Every actuator has a voltage below which nothing happens and a regime above which more voltage buys diminishing force at rising thermal and dielectric cost. Between them sits the useful envelope — and where its edges fall depends on the geometry and the material.

Mapping ignition, saturation, and electrical behaviour across that parameter space turns a catalogue of individual results into design guidance: given a flow problem and a power budget, which actuator, driven how.

Getting this right also means being honest about the measurement itself. A controlled comparison of Rogowski-coil and resistive-shunt current sensing on the same discharge, for example, surfaced significant negative-cycle artefacts — the kind of thing that quietly biases a whole dataset if nobody checks.

Looking down the long, dark interior of a large wind tunnel toward the distant lit test section.
Inside the UW Kirsten Wind Tunnel.

03 Method

Instrumentation

I design and operate the full experimental chain, and build the hardware when the hardware does not exist.

Drive & diagnostics

High-voltage AC systems with oscilloscope-based voltage and current diagnostics, including Rogowski-coil and resistive-shunt current measurement and discharge power analysis.

Imaging

Intensified high-speed imaging to resolve discharge structure and evolution within the drive cycle.

Force & flow

Precision force measurement, moment-isolation fixtures, live thrust-and-drag balances, and velocity-profile measurement in wind-tunnel flow up to 40 m/s.

Motion & acquisition

Multi-axis CNC positioning with NI data acquisition, automated end to end — an approach that removed roughly 63% of collection and processing time on my undergraduate work.

Analysis

Signal processing and automated analysis of large experimental datasets in Python and MATLAB, feeding empirical and reduced-order models.

Design & simulation

Mechanical design and fabrication in SolidWorks, with CFD in Ansys Fluent for transient and moderate- to high-Reynolds-number flows.

04 Projects

Test systems, built and advised

  • 2025 – 2026Contract R&D

    Customer-sponsored plasma actuator programmes

    Spectree Inc · Mechanical Engineer

    • Coordinated day-to-day execution of plasma-actuator R&D for major aerospace and defence organisations, translating programme objectives into research plans, experiments, and recurring deliverables.
    • Led weekly technical meetings with customer engineering teams and owned biweekly and monthly technical reports synthesising data, modelling, literature, risks, and recommendations.
    • Contributed directly to high-voltage test-system development, actuator characterisation, instrumentation troubleshooting, and reduced-order modelling.

  • 2023 – 2024Capstone advising

    In-tunnel test system for plasma-actuated airfoils

    UW Mechanical Engineering · Undergraduate capstone advisor

    • Advised a senior team designing and validating a modular NACA 0018 airfoil test setup with an array of DBD actuators, sized for the UW Aerodynamics Lab 3′ × 3′ wind tunnel.
    • Defined technical requirements and ran design reviews covering mechanical design, high-voltage integration, instrumentation, and wind-tunnel implementation.
    • Guided testing, troubleshooting, data interpretation, and final validation of lift and drag with the discharge on and off across angles of attack.

  • 2022 – 2023Senior capstone

    DBD plasma active flow control model-aircraft test bench

    UW Mechanical Engineering · Team member

    • First-generation test bench for evaluating DBD actuators on an airfoil, built as a platform for the lab’s later active flow control work.
    • Contributed mechanical design, high-voltage system integration, Ansys Fluent CFD, experimental planning, and project coordination.
    • Testing exposed the mechanical and measurement limits that set the requirements for the in-tunnel system that followed.
Conference poster titled Plasma Active Flow Control for Aircraft, showing the airfoil test setup, force balance, and lift and drag results with the plasma on and off.
Capstone poster, UW ME Capstone Exposition 2024 — the in-tunnel plasma-actuated airfoil test system I advised.

05 Teaching

Teaching & mentorship

I was a teaching assistant at UW from 2024 to 2025 across three thermodynamics and fluid mechanics courses at undergraduate and graduate level. I led instructional sessions, supported laboratory and computational work, and evaluated technical assignments — including developing an Ansys Fluent project on transient and moderate- to high-Reynolds-number flows.

Alongside teaching I mentor undergraduate researchers in the lab and advise capstone teams. I also serve as the group's Chemical Hygiene Officer, where a sustained push on procedure and documentation moved our EHS inspection score from 44 to 96 and contributed to a laboratory safety recognition.

  • ME 323 · Thermodynamics
  • ME 333 · Fluid Mechanics
  • ME 538 · Advanced Fluid Mechanics
Publications & talks Full CV benprice@uw.edu