One-dimensional modelling of DBDs in Ne–Xe mixtures for excimer lamps

Abstract

Dielectric barrier discharges (DBDs) are a promising technology for high-intensity sources of specific UV and VUV radiation. In this work, the microdischarge dynamics in DBDs for Ne−Xe mixtures under the close conditions of excimer lamp working has been investigated. The computer model including the cathode fall, the positive column and the dielectric is composed of two coupled sub-models. The first submodel describes the electrical properties of the discharge and is based on a fluid, two-moments description of electron and ion transport coupled with Poisson's equation during the discharge pulse. The second submodel, based on three main modules: a plasma chemistry module, a circuit module and a Boltzmann equation module, with source terms deduced from the electric model, describes the time variations of charged and excited species concentrations and the UV photon emission. The use of the present description allows a good resolution near the sheath at high pressure and it predicts correctly the waveform of the discharge behavior. The effects of operation voltage, dielectric capacitance, gas mixture composition, gas pressure, as well as the secondary electron emission by ion at the cathode on the discharge characteristics and the 173 nm photon generation have been investigated and discussed.

Theoretical investigation of streamer characteristics in Ne–Xe–HCl pulsed high-pressure discharges

“…The transport coefficients and the electronic collision frequencies, which depend on the reduced electric field (E/N), are precalculated and tabulated by solving the steady state, homogeneous electron Boltzmann equation, using BOLSIG solver [26]. It is worth noting that the bibliographic research on the electronic reaction rates shows that most of references are long-established, but they constitute the basis of the set of models used for description of plasma display panels [27], excimer lamps and lasers [10,14,16,[28][29][30].…”

Electrical Approach of Homogenous High Pressure Ne/Xe/HCl Dielectric Barrier Discharge for XeCl (308 nm) Lamp

“…However, the kinetic processes in the plasma responsible for the enhanced lamp performance and increased efficiency are not well understood and the principal disadvantage of excimer DBD discharge is especially their low efficiency. Furthermore in order to optimize the discharge luminance efficiency, several experimental, theoretical and detailed computer-modeling studies of the plasma kinetics in pulse-excited DBDs have been realized in the last decade [17][18][19][20][21][22][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38]. It has been shown that the efficiency of excimer lamp can be increased up to 60% by employing a fast rise-time and a short pulsed voltage excitation [21,24,37,39].…”