Abstract. Dielectric barrier discharges (BDs) are known to operate in two distinctive modes. Filamentary mode of DB is characterized by large number of short lasting spatially bounded microdischarges. This type of discharge is typical for most cases of BDs at atmospheric pressure. Under some specific conditions another form of BD may arise. In this mode plasma covers uniformly the whole electrode area. This mode is usually referred to as diffuse or homogeneous mode of BD.This work presents studies of filamentary mode of BD in argon and its transition to the diffuse mode by ammonia addition. The discharges were investigated by the means of Cross Correlation Spectroscopy (CCS). Particularly the influence of electrode shape, discharge gap and influence of ammonia admixture on discharge development were studied. The measurement offers results with high temporal and spatial resolution which are useful for comparison with results of numerical models.The obtained results include the electrical current measurement of discharge in several ammonia admixtures to argon. The diffuse discharge appeared at ammonia admixture above 3 vol% The observed propagation of streamer in discharge in pure argon for two different electrode configuration is presented. When compared to discharge in pure argon the streamer velocity is decreased for 0.1 vol% ammonia admixture. With increasing ammonia concentration the streamer velocity increases again. The behaviour of presented impurities was observed and the results are included in this report. The basic model of the discharge kinetic is included. For reduced electric field below 10 Td the electron drift is much higher in argon ammonia mixture than in pure argon.

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The spectral and spatial characteristics of three-dimensional radiation transfer across an arc column of 0.08 m long, typical in high-voltage gas blast circuit breakers, has been studied in detail. The arc column under study corresponds to an instantaneous current of 15 kA in SF6 gas at a pressure of 10 bar. Our results show that to calculate the radiative flux divergence (as a volumetric energy source), only a segment of the arc column of 0.024 m in thickness needs to be considered to attain an accuracy of better than 90%. Photons with a frequency lower than 21015 Hz (150 nm in wavelength) can travel a considerable distance (> 0.02 m) with an intensity attenuation factor of 0.2-0.8. Above 21015 Hz, only photons from the continuum spectrum can travel up to 0.015 m and line emission is absorbed within a distance of typically 0.0005 m, i.e. the arcing gas is optically thick to these photons. The gas within a cross-section of the arc column can be divided into a net emission core and a net absorption zone. 55% - 75% of the radiation emitted from the core is reabsorbed. The starting position of the net absorption zone sits within the temperature interval of 75% to 80% of the maximum temperature on the axis. The quantitative information from this work is expected to serve as baseline data for developing improved approximate models for radiation transfer calculation in SF6 switching arcs.

In radiation modeling of thermal plasmas non-grey models are applied where the radiative transport is described in several frequency bands (spectral intervals). Hereby mean absorption coefficients have to be calculated by a spectral integration procedure, providing a constant mean absorption coefficient for each band. Depending on the number of bands, one or more integration boundaries have to be selected in order to do the integration. In this paper we evaluate the influence of the selection of these integration boundaries on the mean absorption coefficient and the also radiation transfer by applying the mean absorption coefficients in a radiation transport model. Using a simplified twoband model we demonstrate that the selection of the integration boundary has a large impact on the total model accuracy. We show that in some cases selecting a band boundary right at the frequency where the continuum absorption shows a jump can introduce a significant error into the radiation calculation. The process of the integration interval selection thus demands a global optimization procedure to properly evaluate the boundaries of each frequency band.

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