Investigation on the effect of impurities in xenon based dielectric barrier discharge lamps

In any discharges, the existence of impurities could give a severe change or bring a negative or positive effect to the discharge and plasma characteristics. The authors purposely added a few kinds of impurities and their effect on the discharge was investigated. The common and typical impurities of H2, N2, CO2 and CH4 were applied in varying concentration percentages into a xenon DBD lamp. Their discharge condition, emission spectra and electrical characteristics were studied. The plasma generation differs from one type of impurity to another. With two different concentrations of hydrogen, at 5% concentration it would stabilize the discharge and at 0.5% concentrations it would give an additional collision process where a strong peak of atomic lines were observed. Nitrogen with two types of concentration i.e., 1% and 0.1% gives two kinds of characteristics in emission spectroscopy. From the electrical parameters, the voltage across the gap shows the lamps with impurities have a higher value compared to the pure xenon lamp. Confidential: not for distribution. Submitted to IOP Publishing for peer review 25 March 2010