Electrical Characterization of Atmospheric Pressure Gaseous Discharge

Abstract

This paper reports the generation of atmospheric pressure gaseous discharge and its electrical characterization. For this purpose, a point-plane electrode system has been fabricated. A high voltage power supply (0-11 kV, 50 Hz) was applied across the electrodes. Discharge was generated with and without the dielectric barrier between the electrodes. The gas discharge was seen as in-homogenous filamentary type discharge without the dielectric. Whereas the filamentary discharge turned into bluish glow when the lower electrode was covered by a dielectric. The current and voltage of the discharge were measured by using a high frequency digital oscilloscope. The power consumed by the discharge was measured from the measured values of current and voltage. A special attention has been paid to investigate the effect of electrode geometry on the nature of the discharge Key words: Gaseous discharge, point-plane electrode, dielectric material, filamentary discharge, current and voltage measurement INTRODUCTIONRecently, much attention has been paid to the development of atmospheric pressure nonthermal plasma sources. The dielectric barrier discharge (DBD), as one of the main nonequilibrium plasma sources, can generate a non-equilibrium plasma under atmospheric pressure, requiring no expensive vacuum equipment, which is a must for conventional low-pressure glow discharge, and so processing cost is reduced and the ability of continuous processing is improved, and therefore large-scale industrial applications are possible [5][6][7]. Because of the thermal non-equilibrium between electrons and the bulk of the plasma, many physico-chemical reactions of interest can be carried out at near ambient temperature without any damage to the bulk of the material.