Interactions between adjacent surface streamers in a packed bed dielectric barrier discharges (PBDBDs)

Packed bed dielectric barrier discharges (PBDBDs) are promising for plasma catalysis applications. In a typical PBDBD, a volume DBD is filled with dielectric (catalyst support) pellets. The surface streamer’s or surface ionization wave’s propagation over the dielectric pellet surface is considered to be very important for plasma catalyst synergy. In this work, we have used a PBDBD with regularly arranged dielectric pellets with precise gaps in between to investigate the interaction between adjacent surface streamers, from both experiment and modeling using nonPDPSIM [1]. Experimental results indicate that a larger gap between adjacent pellets increases the plasma emission near the contact points. The modeling shows that the observed effect of the gap between the dielectric pellets is based on repulsion between adjacent streamers and attraction towards the adjacent dielectric pellet. For smaller gaps, the surface streamers move from the pellet surface to the volume and back towards the surface. For larger gaps, the surface streamers propagate along the dielectric surface, but their speed is influenced by the offset from the adjacent streamer. If there is no adjacent streamer, the streamer propagation speed will increase considerably near the contact point, which elucidates the role of repulsion in surface streamer propagation.

[1] Juliusz Kruszelnicki et al. J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 50 025203 (2017)