Using a plasma jet composed of two needle electrodes, a laminar plasma plume with large volume is generated in air through an alternating current voltage excitation. Based on highspeed photography, a train of filaments is observed to propagate periodically away from their birth place along the gas flow. The laminar plume is in fact a temporal superposition of the arched filament train. The filament consists of a negative glow near the real time cathode, a positive column near the real time anode, and a Faraday dark space between them. It has been found that the propagation velocity of the filament increases with increasing the gas flow rate. Furthermore, the filament lifetime tends to follow a normal distribution (Gaussian distribution). The most probable lifetime decreases with increasing the gas flow rate or decreasing the averaged peak voltage. Results also indicate that the real time peak current decreases and the real time peak voltage increases with the propagation of the filament along the gas flow. The voltage-current curve indicates that, in every discharge cycle, the filament evolves from a Townsend discharge to a glow one and then the discharge quenches. Characteristic regions including a negative glow, a Faraday dark space, and a positive column can be discerned from the discharge filament. Furthermore, the plasma parameters such as the electron density, the vibrational temperature and the gas temperature are investigated based on the optical spectrum emitted from the laminar plume.

Using two water electrodes, a micro-gap dielectric barrier discharge excited by a saw-tooth voltage is investigated in atmospheric pressure argon. Through electrical and optical measurements, it is found that, at a lower driving frequency, a stepped discharge mode is obtained per half voltage cycle. Moreover, the duration and amplitude of the current plateau increase with the increase in the applied peak voltage. With the increase in the driving frequency, the stepped discharge mode transits into a pulsed one after a multi-peak mode. During this process, a diffuse discharge at a lower frequency transits into a filamentary one at a higher frequency. Temporal evolutions of the discharges are investigated axially based on fast photography. It is found that the stepped mode is in atmospheric pressure Townsend discharge (APTD) regime. However, there is a transition from APTD to atmospheric pressure glow discharge for the pulsed mode. Spectral intensity ratio of 391.4 nm to 337.1 nm is used to determine the averaged electron energy, which decreases with increasing peak voltage or driving frequency.

A plasma jet excited by a direct current voltage is developed to generate a diffuse plasma plume by blowing atmospheric pressure argon. Results show that the plume discharge operates in a single-pulsed mode or a continuous one depending on the applied voltage. For the single-pulsed mode, the discharge frequency increases with increasing the applied voltage or the air concentration, while it keeps almost constant with increasing the argon flow rate. The discharge dynamics at the breakdown stage indicate that the light emission propagates along the gas flow at a velocity in the order of 10 4 m s −1 . The spatially resolved emission intensity at the afterglow stage of the pulsed discharge manifests a stratification into dark and bright luminous regions along the gas flow. For the continuous mode, however, the emission intensity gradually decreases along the gas flow. It is found that the continuous discharge is in a Townsend discharge regime judged from both the positive slope of the voltage-current curve and the small current density on the cathode surface. Based on optical emission spectroscopy, excited electron temperature and gas temperature of the plasma plume are obtained by a Boltzmann plot and fitting the spectra of OH radicals, respectively.

A diffuse argon plume at atmospheric pressure is generated downstream of a longitudinal slit jet equipped with a dielectric barrier discharge in a quadri-electrode configuration. Results indicate that both the plume length and the spectral line intensities increase with the increase in the peak voltage. With fast photography it is found that there is a clear difference for discharges with different polarities. The positive discharge is composed of nonuniform branching filaments; however, it is fairly uniform for the negative discharge. Due to the charge overflow of the intra-electrode discharge, the streamer mechanism is involved in the plume discharge. In fact, the positive discharge and the negative one correspond to a cathode-directed streamer and an anode-directed streamer, respectively. The formation mechanisms of the branching filaments and the diffuse background are discussed at last.

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