Effect of plasma chemistry on the simulation of helium atmospheric-pressure plasmas Original Research Article

The effect on the selection of different plasma chemistries for simulating a typical dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) driven by quasi-pulsed power source (20 kHz) is investigated. The numerical simulation was performed by using the one-dimensional self-consistent fluid modeling solver. Our simulation result indicates that the computed temporal current density can be significantly improved by using a complex version of plasma chemistry module rather than the simple one and demonstrates an excellent agreement with the experimental data. The result suggests the metastable, excited and ionic helium related reaction channels, which are important in simulating a DBD, should be taken into account. Furthermore, it also reveals that the power absorption of ions is considerably higher than that of the electron.