DC high voltage to drive helium plasma jet comprised of repetitive streamer breakdowns

Abstract

This paper demonstrates and studies helium atmospheric pressure plasma jet comprised of series of repetitive streamer breakdowns, which is driven by a pure DC high voltage (auto-oscillations). Repetition frequency of the breakdowns is governed by the geometry of discharge electrodes/surroundings and gas flow rate. Each next streamer is initiated when the electric field on the anode tip recovers after the previous breakdown and reaches the breakdown threshold value of about 2.5 kV/cm. Repetition frequency of the streamer breakdowns excited using this principle can be simply tuned by reconfiguring the discharge electrode geometry. This custom-designed type of the helium plasma jet, which operates on the DC high voltage and is comprised of the series of the repetitive streamer breakdowns at frequency about 13 kHz, is demonstrated.