Development of a dielectric barrier discharge enhanced plasma jet in atmospheric pressure air

A plasma jet equipped with dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) is developed to generate diffuse air plasma with fairly large gap and cross sectional area. The diffuse air plasma has two discharge modes under different gap widths from the nozzle to the ground plate electrode. For large gap width, a diffuse plume fills the whole space between the nozzle and the plate electrode after coaxial DBD is ignited when the applied voltage reaches a certain value. Rather than diffuse plasma plume, a bright plasma column bridges the nozzle and the plate electrode with further increasing the applied voltage under small gap width. By optical and electrical measurement, results show that the macroscopically diffuse discharge in air is obtained by the superimposition of radially distributed streamers that appear at different cycles of the applied voltage, and the bright plasma column belongs to atmospheric pressure glow discharge. The molecular vibrational temperature and the gas temperature are given as functions of the peak value of the applied voltage. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4752751]