Abstract
Minimizing the voltage of corona discharges, especially when using nanomaterials, has been of great interest in the past decade or so. In this paper, we report a new corona discharge device by using ZnO nanowires operated in atmospheric air to realize continuous corona discharge excited by hundreds of volts. ZnO nanowires were synthesized on microelectrodes using electric-field-assisted wet chemical method, and a thin tungsten film was deposited on the microchip to enhance discharging performance. The testing results showed that the corona inception voltages were minimized greatly by using nanowires compared to conventional dischargers as a result of the local field enhancement of nanowires. The corona could be continuously generated and self-sustaining. It was proved that the law of corona inception voltage obeyed the conventional Peek’s breakdown criterion. An optimal thickness of tungsten film coated over ZnO nanowires was figured out to obtain the lowest corona inception voltage. The ion concentration of the nanowire-based discharger attained 1017/m3 orders of magnitude, which is practicable for most discharging applications.
Highlights
A corona discharge arises from an ionization and partial breakdown of surrounding atmospheric gases at a highly curved electrode within a strong electric field
Recent studies on the ionization of atmospheric air have paid their attentions to continuous corona discharges with microscale or nanoscale needles which permit the reduction in physical size and cost of the corona ionizers
We presented a comprehensive design and analysis on the continuous corona dischargers using ZnO nanowires, which were synthesized on microelectrodes using an electric-field-assisted wet chemical method and coated by a thin tungsten film to enhance their conductivity and discharging performance
Summary
A corona discharge arises from an ionization and partial breakdown of surrounding atmospheric gases at a highly curved electrode within a strong electric field. Park et al [21] reported a ZnO nanowire charger with an interstitial gap of 0.9 mm between electrodes, whose corona starting voltage was 1.6 kV and the generated ion concentrations were 6.7 × 108/cm3–4.3 × 109/cm3 at the applied voltages of 2–3.1 kV.
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