Electrical and optical characterization of DBD based XeCl UV excimer source

Abstract

In recent decades, interest in development of novel UV/VUV sources with spontaneous emission has grown1. Among the all UV/VUV sources, excimers occupy major attention due to the many characteristics, such as, technological features, design, the service life, the cost, etc. In all types of known excimer sources, Dielectric Barrier Discharge (DBD) is most effective and low cost technique2. In this work a DBD based XeCl UV excimer source has been developed. In the developed volume discharge (VD) configuration of DBD source, the temporal behaviour of the electrical quantities of the discharge has been obtained using an equivalent electrical circuit model3 to electrically characterize the developed source. Furthermore, to identify the dependency on diffusion process an emission spectroscopy analysis is also performed. The source is a single barrier DBD filled with binary mixture of xenon and chlorine gases. A unipolar pulse-like waveform has been used to excite the discharge. Based on the electrical and spectroscopy analysis, the discharge parameters are obtained which has been optimized to improve the radiation efficiency of the rare gas monohalide XeCl* (308nm) from this source. This particular spectral line is highly applicable for skin treatment. The nonexistence of the mercury in the excilamps is the creditable to cite and the DBD based excilamps are giving the competition to the mercury filled lamps which are ecological insecure for the human health.