Spontaneous UV-emission from nitrogen and rare-gas halogen excimers in a fast-flowing crossed-beam plasma-mixing device for pollution control

Summary form only given. Air pollution, water (under ground or ground), and soil contamination have become major issues with increasing industrialization. In addition to conventional incineration techniques, non-thermal plasma techniques and photolysis have been demonstrated to be very powerful tools converting pollutants into harmless chemicals. The use of excimer lamps for pollution control provides an important advantage. Emission spectrum of excimer molecules depends on the type of the gas molecules in the discharge tube forming the particular excimer molecule. Therefore, by choosing the adequate gas mixture, an emission may be found which coincides with the absorption maximum of the pollutant. One other advantage of using excimer lamps is the high efficiency of these lamps in the UV region compared to the conventional lamps. The photon energy efficiency of an excimer lamp can be as high as 10% depending on the design. We have developed the technique of "fast plasma mixing" which overcomes some of the disadvantages of excimer generation in a glow discharge, or in an electron beam sustained gas discharge, and offers an effective way to generate continuous wave UV radiation. This technique utilizes near resonant energy and charge transfer from metastable rare gas atoms and ions to molecules. A fast-flowing crossed-beam plasma mixing device can be utilized to obtain high efficiency UV lamps for industrial use. In this work, basic concepts of the crossed-beam plasma-mixing device operation are presented.