Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The back-diffusion effect of air on the discharge characteristics of atmospheric-pressure radio-frequency glow discharges using bare metal electrodes

2007; IOP Publishing; Volume: 16; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1088/0963-0252/16/2/011

1361-6595

Wenting Sun, Tianran Liang, Hua-Bo Wang, He‐Ping Li, Cheng‐Yu Bao,

Aerosol Filtration and Electrostatic Precipitation

Radio-frequency (RF), atmospheric-pressure glow discharge (APGD) plasmas using bare metal electrodes have promising prospects in the fields of plasma-aided etching, deposition, surface treatment, disinfection, sterilization, etc. In this paper, the discharge characteristics, including the breakdown voltage and the discharge voltage for sustaining a stable and uniform α mode discharge of the RF APGD plasmas are presented. The experiments are conducted by placing the home-made planar-type plasma generator in ambient and in a vacuum chamber, respectively, with helium as the primary plasma-forming gas. When the discharge processes occur in ambient, particularly for the lower plasma-working gas flow rates, the experimental measurements show that it is the back-diffusion effect of air in atmosphere, instead of the flow rate of the gas, that results in the obvious decrease in the breakdown voltage with increasing plasma-working gas flow rate. Further studies on the discharge characteristics, e.g. the luminous structures, the concentrations and distributions of chemically active species in plasmas, with different plasma-working gases or gas mixtures need to be conducted in future work.