Generation of high pressure homogeneous dielectric barrier discharge in air

Abstract

We succeeded in generating an atmospheric pressure Townsend discharge (APTD) in air by using a simple DBD device that consists of alumina barriers and plane electrodes. So far, we applied the APTD to an ozonizer and found that the ozone generation efficiency was higher by the APTD mode than by the conventional DBD mode in larger specific input energy region. It is well known that an operation under an optimized high gas pressure is advantageous for efficient ozone generation from air. In this paper, we investigated whether the Townsend discharge (TD) in dry air in high pressure up to 0.17 MPa can be generated or not. From the observation results of current waveforms and discharge photographs, we found that (1) the discharge currents flow continuously and have only one peak in every half cycle in all gas pressure and (2) filamentary discharges are not recognized between barriers in all gas pressure. These features completely agree with the features of the APTD we reported. Therefore, we concluded that our TD can be generated even in dry air in the pressure range of 0.1 and 0.17 MPa.