Thin insulating film deposition on copper by atmospheric‐pressure plasmas

Abstract

Long‐time partial discharge (PD) is regarded as one of the main reasons for the insulation failure of high‐voltage cables. In this work, we report on the application of atmospheric pressure plasma to deposit siloxane film on copper to avoid PDs. The dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma is driven by AC power supply, with tetraethoxysilane (TEOS), argon, and oxygen mixture as the source gas. The effect of oxygen gas flow rate on the thin film surface morphology, chemical composition, and electrical properties is studied systematically. Our results show that the stability of the plasma deteriorated, when the oxygen flow rate exceeded 10 sccm. The addition of oxygen in the source gas induced a high oxidation level of deposited thin film. The chemical composition of thin film was in the form of SiOx (x = 1.9) with 10 sccm oxygen compared to SiOx (x = 1.2), when deposited in the absence of oxygen. Additionally, the optimal thin film with good stability was obtained with the surface resistivity 1.1 × 1011 Ω, when deposited in the absence of oxygen. The corresponding relative permittivity of the deposited thin film is 2.9. The simulation results demonstrated that the electric field distortion was weaken after the film deposition, which reduced the probability of PD to occur.

The effects of the tube diameter on the discharge ignition and the plasma properties of atmospheric‐pressure microplasma confined inside capillary

“…[44,45] Plus, the electron density of the microplasma inside small capillary is really high, which is close to that in transient spark. [33] The Equations (5) and (6) based on the streamer mechanism may be not applicable for the cases of the tube diameter less than 30 µm. Coincidently, it is interesting to observe that, when the tube diameter decreases from 20 to 4 µm, the propagation velocity of the microplasma plume is weakly dependent on the tube diameter.…”

“…Atmospheric-pressure non-thermal plasma jets have been attracting great interests because of their promising applications in plasma medicine [1][2][3] and material processing. [4][5][6][7][8] Generally speaking, the plasma jets are first ignited inside a dielectric tube, and then propagating along a noble gas column guided by the tube. The plasma jet is generated in an open space, rather than in a narrow space in dielectric barrier discharges (DBD).…”

Ignition properties of helium discharges in dielectric tubes with radius from 50 µm to 3 mm

“…Atmospheric pressure low temperature plasma has shown great potential in various application fields including medical treatment and material processing . Typically, the dielectric barrier structure is used in the plasma devices to generate moderate discharge with abundant active species, while the conducting current and gas temperature remain low to avoid electric and thermal damages .…”

The Optimization of Plasma Catalytic Liquefaction Technique for the Conversion of Sawdust Into Value-Added Chemicals

“…In non-thermal plasma, the overall gas temperature can be as low as room temperature, while the electrons are highly energetic with a typical electron temperature of 1-10 eV, which can easily enable many chemical reactions to occur under ambient conditions [26]. Therefore, non-thermal has been widely applied in pollutant treatment [27]- [30], material synthesis [31], [32], biomedical processing [33], [34] and energy transforming [35], [36]. In liquid phase, micro-plasma discharge was successfully employed on the catalytic liquefaction of bamboo shoot shell and remarkably shorten the reaction time to 3 min when polyethylene glycol 400 (PEG 400) and ethylene glycol (EG) were used as the solvent [24].…”