Fluid simulations of glow discharges: Effect of metastable atoms in argon

Abstract

A one-dimensional fluid simulation of a 13.56 MHz argon glow discharge including metastable species was performed as an example of a coupled glow-discharge/neutral-transport-reaction system. Due to the slow response time of metastables (∼10 ms) direct time integration of the coupled system requires ∼105 rf cycles to converge. This translates to prohibitively long computation time. An ‘‘acceleration’’ scheme was employed using the Newton–Raphson method to speed up convergence, thereby reducing the computation time by orders of magnitude. For a pressure of 1 Torr, metastables were found to play a major role in the discharge despite the fact that their mole fraction was less than 10−5. In particular, metastable (two-step) ionization was the main mechanism for electron production to sustain the discharge. Bulk electric field and electron energy were lower, and a smaller fraction of power was dissipated in the bulk plasma when compared to the case without metastables. These results suggest that neutral transport and reaction must be considered in a self-consistent manner in glow discharge simulations, even in noble gas discharges.