Influence of inert gas addition on electric breakdown using dielectric barrier discharge in oxygen

School of Environmental & Chemical Engineering, Nanchang University, Nanchang 330031, P.R. China

^a e-mail: weilinsheng@ncu.edu.cn

Received: 7 September 2013
Revised: 10 April 2014
Accepted: 20 May 2014
Published online: 11 July 2014

Abstract

This paper studies the influence of inert gas additions He, Ar, Kr and Xe on breakdown voltage within dielectric barrier discharge reactor with oxygen feed gas. The density-normalized effective ionization coefficients α_eff/N are calculated for inert gas/O₂ mixtures, the critical reduced field E/N_cr is obtained where the electron ionization exactly balances the attachment. Adding inert gases would lead to the decreasing critical reduced field strength E/N_cr due to the enhancement of effective ionization coefficient. In addition, inert gas additions have shown to reduce the breakdown voltage. Moreover the numerical breakdown voltage values and the experimental data are plotted for the sake of comparison and results show that calculated results are in agreement with the experimental values. Parametric study offers substantial insight in plasma physics, as well as in ozone generation applications.