Investigation of O atom kinetics in O₂ plasma and its afterglow

Abstract

We have developed a comprehensive kinetic model to study the O atom kinetics in an O2 plasma and its afterglow. By adopting a pseudo-1D plug-flow formalism within the kinetic model, our aim is to assess how far the O atoms travel in the plasma afterglow, evaluating its potential as a source of O atoms for post-plasma gas conversion applications. Since we could not find experimental data for pure O2 plasma at atmospheric pressure, we first validated our model at low pressure (1-10 Torr) where very good experimental data are available. Good agreement between our model and experiments was achieved for the reduced electric field, gas temperature and the densities of the dominant neutral species, i.e. O2(a), O2(b) and O. Subsequently, we confirmed that the chemistry set is consistent with thermodynamic equilibrium calculations at atmospheric pressure. Finally, we investigated the O atom densities in the O2 plasma and its afterglow, for which we considered a microwave O2 plasma torch, operating at a pressure between 0.1 and 1 atm, for a flow rate of 20 slm and an SEI of 1656 kJ/mol. Our results show that for both pressure conditions, a high dissociation degree of ca. 92 % is reached within the discharge. However, the O atoms travel much further in the plasma afterglow for p = 0.1 atm (9.7 cm) than for p = 1 atm (1.4 cm), attributed to the longer lifetime (3.8 ms at 0.1 atm vs 1.8 ms at 1 atm) resulting from slower three-body recombination kinetics, as well as a higher volumetric flow rate.