Electrical and plasma characteristics of a quasi-steady sliding discharge

Abstract

A quasi-steady sliding discharge at atmospheric pressure is generated by combining a surface dielectric barrier together with a DC corona discharge in a three-electrode geometry. The discharge extends along the whole side-length of the electrodes (150 mm) and covers the full inter-electrode gap (30 mm). It is found that this discharge is composed of repetitive streamers that are uniformly distributed along the whole electrode length and that propagate along the inter-electrode gap with an average velocity of ~2 × 107 cm s-1, and with an average electric field of ~120 kV cm-1 and a total particle number of ~5 × 108 at the streamer head. Assuming that the electron distribution function reaches an equilibrium value with the electric field, an electron temperature of 9 eV at the streamer head is obtained. The streamer frequency is around 5 × 104 Hz for a well-developed sliding discharge regime, and the time-averaged electron density amounts to 1.5 × 107 cm-3.