Effects of O_(2) addition on the plasma uniformity and reactivity of Ar DBD excited by ns pulsed and AC power supplies

Dielectric barrier discharges(DBDs)have been widely used in ozone synthesis,materials surface treatment,and plasma medicine for their advantages of uniform discharge and high plasmachemical reactivity.To improve the reactivity of DBDs,in this work,the O_(2) is added into Ar nanosecond(ns)pulsed and AC DBDs.The uniformity and discharge characteristics of Ar ns pulsed and AC DBDs with different O_(2) contents are investigated with optical and electrical diagnosis methods.The DBD uniformity is quantitatively analyzed by gray value standard deviation method.The electrical parameters are extracted from voltage and current waveforms separation to characterize the discharge processes and calculate electron density n_(e).The optical emission spectroscopy is measured to show the plasma reactivity and calculate the trend of electron temperature T_(e) with the ratio of two emission lines.It is found that the ns pulsed DBD has a much better uniformity than AC DBD for the fast rising and falling time.With the addition of O_(2),the uniformity of ns pulsed DBD gets worse for the space electric field distortion by O_(2)^(-),which promotes the filamentary formation.While,in AC DBD,the added O_(2) can reduce the intensity of filaments,which enhances the discharge uniformity.The ns pulsed DBD has a much higher instantaneous power and energy efficiency than AC DBD.The ratio of Ar emission intensities indicates that the T_(e) drops quickly with the addition of O_(2) both ns pulsed and AC DBDs and the ns pulsed DBD has an obvious higher T_(e) and n_(e) than AC DBD.The results are helpful for the realization of the reactive and uniform low temperature plasma sources.

Characteristics of a large gap uniform discharge excited by DC voltage at atmospheric pressure

A large-gap uniform discharge is ignited by a coaxial dielectric barrier discharge and burns between a needle anode and a plate cathode under a low sustaining voltage by feeding with flowing argon. The basic aspects of the large-gap uniform discharge are investigated by optical and spectroscopic methods. From the discharge images, it can be found that this discharge has similar regions with glow discharge at low pressure except a plasma plume region. Light emission signals from the discharge indicate that the plasma column is invariant with time, while there are some stochastic pulses in the plasma plume region. The optical emission spectra scanning from 300 nm to 800 nm are used to calculate the excited electron temperature and vibrational temperature of the large-gap uniform discharge. It has been found that the excited electron temperature almost keeps constant and the vibrational temperature increases with increasing discharge current. Both of them decreases with increasing gas flow rate.