Design and Electrical Analysis of Multi-Electrode Cylindrical Dielectric Barrier Discharge Plasma Reactor

Abstract

Dielectric barrier discharges (DBDs), due to its unique advantages such as simple design and low operation cost, have gained more and more attention all over the world. However, traditional plasma reactor can always have capacitive current with high peak values, which limits its further application in fields such as plasma catalytic reactions and surface treatment. In this proposed work, a new device named multielectrode cylindrical plasma reactor was presented, where the outer electrode was divided into several strips connected in parallel. The comparative electrical analysis was performed between the multielectrode plasma reactor and the traditional device. The experimental results showed that the multielectrode plasma reactor could give a much lower capacitive current peak value, namely, 5.49 mA compared with 16.26 mA of the traditional one, indicating that the new plasma reactor could decrease the capacitive current to a large extent as designed. In addition, due to the enhanced corona discharge, both the lifetime and peak values of the generated microdischarges were distributed more uniformly and concentrated in a small scale. In addition, the consumed energy by the designed multielectrode plasma reactor was decreased by 29.51% of the traditional plasma reactor, namely, 11.58 W compared with 16.43 W. The discharge mode was analyzed and determined to be mainly filament discharge with enhanced corona discharge at the electrode edges. In conclusion, the plasma reactor with proposed design can give a decreased capacitive current and also the consumed energy, which is helpful in broadening the application field of DBD in plasma catalysis fields.