Investigation on the effect of impurities in xenon based dielectric barrier discharge lamps

Abstract

In any discharges, the existence of impurities could cause a severe change or bring a negative or positive effect to the discharge and plasma characteristics. The authors purposely added a few kinds of impurities and investigated their effect on the discharge. The common and typical impurities of H2, N2, CO2 and CH4 were applied in varying concentration percentages into a xenon dielectric barrier discharge lamp. Their discharge condition, emission spectra and electrical characteristics were studied. The plasma generation differs from one type of impurity to another. With two different concentrations of hydrogen applied, at 5% concentration it would stabilize the discharge and at 0.5% concentration it would cause an additional collision process where a strong peak of atomic lines was observed. Nitrogen with two types of concentration, i.e. 1% and 0.1%, exhibits two kinds of characteristics in emission spectroscopy. From the electrical parameters, the voltage across the gap shows the lamps with impurities have a higher value compared with the pure xenon lamp.