This study aims to improve the impurity analysis by plasma electron spectroscopy for organic molecules. Because the appearance energies of the characteristic Penning electrons vary for different chemical compounds, various impurities can be registered simultaneously in one measurement. Herein, experimental studies were conducted on helium with alcohol vapor impurities in a nonlocal negative glow plasma of a short glow micro-discharge with an increase in pressure from 15 Torr to 150 Torr. Thus, the pressure could be increased to atmospheric pressure, eliminating the need for expensive and cumbersome gas pumping systems.
The collisional electron spectroscopy method for analyzing and determining gaseous impurities was further developed to realize the operation in an open environment. In addition, the method not only facilitates the registration of the impurity components, but also the reactive radicals generated from the discharge reaction. The sandwich-like discharge structure was used to generate a stable, non-local, negative glow equipotential plasma in an open environment, and the I–V characteristic curve of the plasma was collected using an additional sensor electrode. The collisional electron spectroscopy was obtained from the first derivative of the probe current I with respect to the probe potential V by adding a diffusion function to correct it. In addition, our experiment verifies the reliability of the sink theory
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