A novel method of calculating the energy deposition curve of nanosecond pulsed surface dielectric barrier discharge

Abstract

To obtain the energy deposition curve is very important in the fields to which nanosecond pulse dielectric barrier discharges (NPDBDs) are applied. It helps the understanding of the discharge physics and fast gas heating. In this paper, an equivalent circuit model, composed of three capacitances, is introduced and a method of calculating the energy deposition curve is proposed for a nanosecond pulse surface dielectric barrier discharge (NPSDBD) plasma actuator. The capacitance Cd and the energy deposition curve ER are determined by mathematically proving that the mapping from Cd to ER is bijective and numerically searching one Cd that satisfies the requirement for ER to be a monotonically non-decreasing function. It is found that the value of capacitance Cd varies with the amplitude of applied pulse voltage due to the change of discharge area and is dependent on the polarity of applied voltage. The bijectiveness of the mapping from Cd to ER in nanosecond pulse volumetric dielectric barrier discharge (NPVDBD) is demonstrated and the feasibility of the application of the new method to NPVDBD is validated. This preliminarily shows a high possibility of developing a unified approach to calculate the energy deposition curve in NPDBD.