The exploration of discharge efficiency and uniformity improvement with pre-ionized bipolar pulse method in DBD device

Abstract

An exploration of discharge efficiency and uniformity improvement by using pre-ionized bipolar pulse method in dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) device under atmospheric pressure is conducted. Through utilizing the pre-ionized charged particles on the dielectric surface, the amplitude of the applied pulses for sustaining discharge can be significantly decreased. By analyzing the influence of “built-in” electric field from surface charges on discharge efficiency and uniformity, a scheme of pre-ionized bipolar pulse method is proposed. Since the property of “built-in” field is closely dependent with pre-ionized pulse parameters, such as amplitude, pulse number, and polarity, the discharge uniformity and efficiency under different combinations of pre-ionized pulse parameters are investigated. According to experimental results, the discharge efficiency of the proposed method is increased by 11.8% and 17.4%, and the production efficiency of active species of N2(C3Πu→ B3Πg) is increased by 10.4% and 89.5% compared with a conventional bipolar pulse and positive pulse method, respectively, in ambient air. Moreover, the uniformity of DBD discharge is improved, and the maximum intensity difference between discharge regions is decreased from ∼20% to ∼5% compared with the one driven by the conventional positive pulse.