In plasma medicine, plasma is applied to a wet surface and is often accompanied by dry-gas flow. The dry-gas flow affects water evaporation from the wet surface and influences production of reactive species derived from water vapor, such as OH radicals. In this study, the effect of the dry-gas flow on two-dimensional distributions of humidity and OH radical density are examined by measuring them using laser-induced fluorescence (LIF). First, humidity is measured when nitrogen flows from a quartz tube of 4 mm inner diameter onto distilled water and agar media from 5 mm distance. NO gas is added to the nitrogen as a tracer and humidity is obtained from the quenching rate of NO molecules measured using LIF. This measurement has a spatial resolution of 0.2 mm 3 and a temporal resolution of less than 220 ns. The two-dimensional humidity distribution shows that the dry-gas flow pushes away water vapor evaporating from the wet surface. As a result, a low-humidity region is formed near the quartz tube nozzle and a high-humidity region is formed near the wet surface. The thickness of the low-humidity region reduces with increasing gas flow rate. It is 0.1-0.5 mm for the flow rate of higher than 0.3 l min −1 . Next, the OH density is measured when a nanosecond pulsed streamer discharge is applied to a distilled water surface with dry-air flow. The OH density decreases with increasing gas flow rate due to decreased humidity. When the flow rate is lower than 0.1 l min −1 , the OH distribution is approximately uniform in the plasma region, while the humidity distribution shows a large gradient. The importance of the thin high-humidity region on the flux of reactive species onto the wet surface is discussed.
The deoxidization efficiency of nitric monoxide (NO) was improved by shortening the pulse width of the voltage applied to a corona reactor. The deoxidization efficiency of NO was evaluated as the NO removal efficiency in nitrogen (N 2 ) gas containing 200 ppm NO. The corona reactor had a coaxial geometry and consisted of center high-voltage wire and outer grounded cylinder electrodes. A nanosecond high-voltage pulse was generated using an inductive energy storage pulse power circuit with a semiconductor opening switch and was applied to the center wire electrode in the corona reactor. Fast recovery diodes were utilized as a semiconductor opening switch. The pulse width of the applied voltage was reduced from 21 to 14 ns with the arrester connected in parallel to the reactor. The energy efficiency for NO removal was improved from 8.2 to 35.7 g kW %1 h %1 with the arrester connected. The pulse width was also reduced to 8 ns by optimizing the circuit parameters. It was confirmed from observation with an intensified charge-coupled device (ICCD) camera that the streamer corona discharge transited to a glowlike discharge after the streamer propagated from the center wire electrode to the outer cylinder electrode. The duration of the glowlike phase was reduced with the arrester connected. The energy consumed in the glowlike phase was also reduced from 15.7 to 4.6 mJ with the arrester connected.
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