Analysis of the Effects of Complex Electrode Geometries on the Energy Deposition and Electric Field Measurements of Surface Dielectric Barrier Discharges

Abstract

Surface Dielectric Barrier Discharges (SDBDs) have been gaining interest in recent years for numerous applications. One of the advantages of SDBDs is their scalability and flexibility of materials used, allowing larger electrodes than simple linear electrodes investigated in earlier works. This paper seeks to elucidate the properties of more complicated SDBD geometries utilizing differing repeated lattice structures. Voltage and current traces, optical emission spectroscopy, digital imaging, and numerical analysis are used to analyze the electrodes. Reduced electric fields obtained through optical emission spectroscopy and the total power deposited into the plasma are presented. The reduced electric field is not significantly affected by increasing applied voltage, but minor variations could be observed due to the geometry of the electrode lattice structures. Finally, it was observed that plasma power is not a simple linear relationship in these more complicated lattice structures. Smaller lattice structures were observed to have lower energy deposited per period.