Atmospheric gas discharge is very likely to constrict into filaments and diffuse plasma formation is inefficient in most cases. Developing cost-efficient atmospheric diffuse plasma devices represents a significant challenge for high performance in biomedical decontamination and material processing. Here, we propose an alternative roadmap to produce a diffuse argon plasma jet by expanding and quenching the existing filamentary discharge at the initial or middle stage of streamer development. Possible mechanisms are summarized. With the gas flow velocity comparable to the ion drift one, enhancing ambipolar diffusion near the edge of the positive-streamer channel promotes the radial diffusion of newly-produced electrons, realizing the radial expansion of channel. Weakening electric field in front of the streamer head through head expansion and field offset, prevents the further development of streamer, leading to a positive-pseudo-streamer discharge. Reducing electric field in front of the negative-streamer head through ion compensation, impedes the initial growth of streamer, resulting in a negative pulseless glow discharge. The positive-pseudo-streamer and negative pulseless glow discharges function together to form the diffuse plasma jet.
Heavy metal ion-induced water pollution has become a severe environmental problem in the world. Although providing a powerful technique for multi-element detection, laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) suffers from insufficient sensitivity...
A two-dimensional fluid model was used to investigate the characteristics of helium dielectric-barrier discharge (DBD) equipped with double-ring electrodes at atmospheric pressure. Simulation results show that although the temporal evolutions of discharge current and current density at different radial positions exhibit the same or similar characteristics to those in traditional DBD, a distinctive spatial discharge structure is observed during the discharge process. The spatial distribution of electron density at current peak moments exhibits a periodical complementary feature between the center-advantage and the periphery-advantage with the inner ring electrode covering the radial axis from 0.5 to 1.0 mm. When the inner ring electrode covers the radial axis from 1.0 to 1.5 mm, the spatial distribution of electron density satisfies another periodical complementary behavior between the electrode-center-advantage and the coexistence of periphery-advantage and center-advantage. These complementary discharge features mainly result from non-uniform electric field and surface charge distribution at the end of the previous discharge. The difference of the discharge structure between the two cases is attributed to the fact that Laplacian field distributions are largely dependent on the arrangement of double-ring electrodes. Our observations show that electrode geometry plays an important role in the formation of the discharge structure.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.