Abstract: A high frequency and steep front nanosecond pulse power source was used as the excitation source to discharge a typical dual-electrode structure synthetic jet actuator. Particle image velocimetry(PIV) was used to measure the characteristics and development speed of the external stable flow field of the actuator in the discharge experiment. The results show that the average development velocity of the synthetic jet increases with the increase of repetition frequency, and the maximum average velocity at 1 kHz reaches 28.28 m/s. In the case that the energy of single pulse is much lower than that of microsecond pulse, a faster steady state flow field control is realized. This indicates that the total excitation energy can be increased with more times of pulse discharge at a high repetition frequency, which effectively makes up for the shortage of energy output of single nanosecond pulses. The flow field develops faster with higher frequency, which indicates that the high frequency operating mode can compensate the total output energy.