Controlling the number of discharge current pulses in an atmospheric dielectric barrier discharge by voltage waveform tailoring

Atmospheric dielectric barrier discharges driven by tailored voltage waveforms are investigated numerically with a one-dimensional fluid model. We use the multi-frequency pulse-type voltage waveform as the control method and the harmonics N as the control parameter to control the number of discharge current pulses. The simulation results show that as N increases from 1 to 11, the number of discharge current pulses in each voltage half cycle (N-p) decreases from 5 to 1, representing the transition from the multiple-current-pulse mode to the single-current-pulse (SCP) mode. In this process, both the current amplitude (J(pm)) and the gap voltage of the first breakdown moment (V-gb) increase, and the efficiency of the plasma system can be improved by 5.6 times without reducing densities of reactive species. Further analysis reveals that the increase of J(pm) is attributed to the variation in discharge current components, and the value of V-gb can be related to N-p and the surface charge densities. Finally, an analytical method is proposed to estimate the minimum N to achieve the targeted SCP discharge. The results obtained in this work may contribute to the manipulation of power consumption and discharge stability in industrial applications.