Modeling and parametric study of dielectric barrier discharge in pure nitrogen at atmospheric pressure

This paper presents the one-dimensional simulation of the dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) in pure nitrogen at atmospheric pressure using a sinusoidal supply, within a reactor which consists of two parallel plates. For this purpose, significant reactions among the reactive species in the discharge are taken into account in this work by considering more than 70 reactions for 13 species. The model used in this study to describe the kinetics of the plasma species is the second order fluid model which consists in replacing the Boltzmann equation by these first three moments by using the drift-diffusion approximation for flux. In order to validate the model developed in this research, a comparison of the simulated discharge currents obtained with available experimental data is carried out, before presenting the evolution of the properties of the plasma species. After that, a parametric study is performed showing the effect of some parameters like applied voltage, frequency and nature of the coating dielectric material on the characteristics of DBD in nitrogen. Simulation results for a double dielectric DBD reactor are also presented at the end of this paper.