Modeling of Pulsed Direct-Current Glow Discharge

A self-consistent model was adopted to study the time evolution of low-voltage pulsed DC glow discharge. The distributions of electric field, ion density and electron density in nitrogen were investigated in our simulation, and the temporal shape of the discharge current was also obtained. Our results show that the dynamic behaviors of the discharge depends strongly on the applied pulse voltage, and the use of higher pulse voltages results in a significantly increase of discharge current and a decrease of discharge delay time. The current-voltage characteristic calculated by adjusting secondary electron emission coefficient for different applied pulse voltage under the gas pressure of 1 Torr is found in a reasonable agreement with the experimental results.