Upscaling from single- to multi-filament dielectric barrier discharges in pulsed operation

Abstract

A study on the scalability of discharge characteristics of a single-filament dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) to a spatially one-dimensional multi-filament arrangement driven by the same high-voltage (HV) pulses was performed for a gas mixture of 0.1 vol% O2 in N2 at 1 bar. Both arrangements feature a 1 mm gap with dielectric-covered electrodes featuring two hemispherical alumina caps for the single-filament and two parallel alumina-tubes for the multi-filament arrangement. The DBDs were characterised by electrical measurements (for peak current, energy, and power) accompanied by iCCD and streak imaging to determine the filament number and the discharge development in the gas gap and on the surfaces. It was found that the electrical quantities scale with a constant factor between the single- and multi-filament arrangement, which is expected to be related to the filament number. In the multi-filament arrangement, the pulsed operation leads to filament formation in the entire gap in lateral direction within less than 2 ns. Furthermore, particular breakdown or discharge inception regimes were identified for the multi-filament DBDs. These regimes could be generated at the falling slope of asymmetrical HV pulses featuring e.g. a double-streamer propagation, which was previously reported for single-filament DBDs. Consequently, it was proven that the discharge manipulation by varying the HV pulse widths obtained for single-filament DBDs can also be applied in a one-dimensional multi-filament arrangement, i.e. an upscaling based on the knowledge for single-filament DBDs seems to be generally possible.