The effects of the driving frequencies on micro atmospheric pressure He/N2 plasma jets driven by tailored voltage waveforms

Abstract

Capacitively coupled micro atmospheric pressure plasma jets are important tools for the generation of radicals at room temperature for various applications. Voltage waveform tailoring (VWT), which is based on the simultaneous use of a set of excitation frequencies, has been demonstrated to provide an efficient control of the electron energy probability function (EEPF) in such plasmas and, thus, allows optimizing the electron impact driven excitation and dissociation processes as compared to the classical single-frequency operation mode. In this work, the effects of changing the driving frequencies on the spatio-temporally resolved electron power absorption dynamics, the generation of helium metastables and the dissociation of nitrogen molecules are investigated in He/N2 plasmas based on experiments and simulations. We find that under a single-frequency excitation, the plasma and helium metastable densities are enhanced as a function of the driving frequency at a fixed voltage. When using valleys-type driving voltage waveforms synthesized based on consecutive harmonics of the fundamental driving frequency, the spatial symmetry of the electron power absorption dynamics and of the metastable density profile is broken. Increasing the fundamental frequency at a constant voltage is found to drastically enhance the plasma and metastable densities, which is a consequence of the change of the EEPF. Finally, we compare the energy efficiency of the formation of radicals under single-frequency and VWT operation at different driving frequencies. For a given power dissipated in the plasma, VWT yields a higher helium metastable as well as electron density and a higher dissociation rate of N2.