Effect of Dielectric Surface Conductivity on Atmospheric Dielectric Barrier Discharge

Dielectric surface charge transport is an important procedure in dielectric barrier discharges. This procedure is significantly influenced by surface conductivity. In this paper, several pieces of quartz of different surface conductivity prepared by physical sputtering of SnO2, and these quartz glasses were used as barrier to generate dielectric barrier discharges in atmospheric mixed gas of Argon and Nitrogen. In experiments, the discharge power, current, and pulse number were observed and the difference of discharges was discussed. The discharge channel distribution and emission spectrum were also recorded in order to analyze the microdischarge distribution characteristics. Serial experimental results show when the dielectric surface conductivity changed, obvious changes of discharging characteristics including filament number, filament size, spectrum, discharging power et al, will take place. The existence of these obvious changes of discharging properties mainly result from the motion difficulty difference of residual or seed charges on different surface conductivity dielectric surfaces.