Investigations of argon and neon abnormal glow discharges in the presence of metastable atom density with fluid model

Abstract

In this manuscript an investigation of a DC argon and neon abnormal glow discharges with metastable atom density is presented. The values of pressure lie between 133.32 and 330 Pa, and the voltage ranges from 250 to 400 V in the case of argon gas. In the case of neon gas, the pressure has a value of 399.92 Pa (3 Torr) and the voltage ranges from 300 to 500 V. In this framework, an analysis of abnormal glow discharge characteristics is carried out in the case of input data taken from the Boltzmann equation in the multi-term approximation, and in the case of input data obtained from BOLISG+ code. With these differences of input data in the same gas, the output results are different; it appears in the cathodic region. The spatio-temporal distributions of electron and ion densities, the potential and electric field, the mean electron energy and the metastable atom density are shown. A 1D fluid model is used to solve self-consistently the first three moments of the Boltzmann’s equation coupled with the Poisson’s equation. The role of the presence of metastable atom density in the fluid model is clearly because of the domination of ionization processes by both stepwise and penning ionizations. Our results are validated with those obtained by both recent paper and experimental results.