Influence of excitation and geometrical parameters on the VUV radiation of a pure xenon dielectric barrier discharge

Summary form only given. Environmental pollution greatly threatens our life quality and so incites both "law-makers" and scientists to improve existing depollution techniques or even to seek for new ones. Comparing to existing water decontamination processes from volatile organic compounds (VOC), the use of vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) radiation from dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) seems to be most suitable: VUV radiation from excimer is emitted with a high efficiency in narrow band continua, VUV photodegradation of VOC micropolluants is efficient even for very small concentrations. Furthermore, DBD is cheap, versatile, handy and can easily be adapted to any geometrical form of photochemical reactors. Its output radiation can be "controlled" by means of external parameters such as excitation voltage waveform, interelectrode distance, and gas filling nature and gas composition. Our purpose is to study in what extent these parameters influence the output VUV radiation in order to optimize such a water decontamination technique. For that a good knowledge of the spatial and temporal kinetic schemes of the excimer formation and decay is required. We chose both an experimental and modelling approach.