Improvement of efficiency and luminous efficacy of RF Plasma Display Panels by modified cell structure

Abstract

Application of Radio Frequency (RF) voltages with frequency of around 60MHz has been proposed to replace the conventional several hundreds of kHz sustaining voltage. Multiphysics simulation of the RF discharge plasma has been presented for a Plasma Display Panel (PDP) cell structure. The frequency of the applied voltage to the micro-discharge cell has been changed incrementally from 500-kHz to 100-MHz in the calculations and the behavior of the plasma has been discussed. Simulation results indicate that if the frequency of the RF voltage is high enough so that the average amplitude of electron oscillations is less than the gap length, the plasma is efficiently confined by the RF field. In these conditions, the discharge can be sustained at much lower voltages than in the conventional AC PDPs. The ion heating in the sheath is considerably reduced and the electrons excite xenon more efficiently in the lower electric fields. Calculations show that the xenon excitation efficiency can be increased by a factor of 3.7, with respect to conventional AC PDPs. According to this model a novel structure for RF PDP cell structure has also been proposed. It has been shown quantitatively that the luminous efficacy of the proposed structure can reach 4.4 lmW−1.