Atmospheric dielectric barrier discharge containing helium–air mixtures: the effect of dry air impurities on the spatial discharge behavior

Abstract

Abstract Air is a typical and arguably unavoidable impurity in atmospheric pressure dielectric barrier discharges (DBDs). The introduction of air may bring rich plasma chemical effects on DBDs and lead to a significant change of discharge characteristics. Here we implement a two-dimensional fluid model to study the spatial discharge behavior in a helium–dry-air DBD under the air impurity level (N air) of 10–200 ppm. The simulation results reveal that under low impurity content (less than 30 ppm), the gas gap cannot be ignited due to the feeble Penning ionization during the breakdown. However, with an elevation in the impurity level, the progressively enhanced Penning ionization makes the DBD experience three different spatial modes, namely uniform, columnar, and complementary quasi-uniform modes. Of particular note is that the improvement of discharge uniformity observed after the second mode transition is not directly controlled by seed electron level—a previously reported qualitative indicator of the discharge uniformity concluded by helium DBDs with only nitrogen traces. And the main contributor to this phenomenon is the complementary spatial structure appearing in successive two discharges induced by the further reinforced Penning ionization with extra oxygen doped. The result suggests the necessity of considering oxygen in helium–air DBDs when the impurity effect of air is concerned.