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A surface micro-discharge in atmospheric pressure He + N2 mixtures is studied in this paper with an emphasis on the discharge modes. With the N2 admixture increasing from 0.1% to 20%, the discharge evolves from a spatially diffuse mode to a filamentary mode during positive half-cycles of the applied voltage. However during the negative half-cycles, an additional patterned mode emerges between the diffuse and the filamentary modes, which has not been reported before to exist in surface micro-discharges. In the diffuse and patterned modes, the plasmas cover almost the entirety of the mesh area during one cycle after plasma ignition in all mesh elements, and the discharge power increases linearly with the applied voltage. In contrast, plasma coverage of the mesh area is only partial in the filamentary mode and the plasma is more unstable with the discharge power increasing exponentially with the applied voltage. As the surface micro-discharge evolves through the three modes, the density of excited species changes significantly, for instance, the density of N2+(B) drops by ∼20-fold from [N2] = 0.2% to 20%. The N2+(B) is predicted to be generated mainly through successive processes of Penning ionization by helium metastables and electron-impact excitation of N2+(X), the latter is most responsible for the density decrease of N2+(B) because much more N2+(X) is converted to N4+(X) as the increase of N2 fraction. Also, the electron density and electron temperature decrease with the discharge mode transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present in this study how DC bias voltage impacts on the fluxes of reactive species on the skin tissue by means of a plasma–tissue interaction model. The DC bias voltage inputs less than 2% of the total discharge power, and hence it has little influence on the whole plasma characteritics including the volume-averaged densities of reactive species and the heating effect. However, it pushes the plasma bulk towards the skin surface, which significantly changes the local plasma characteristics in the vicinity of the skin surface, and in consequence remarkably enhances the flux densities of reactive species on the skin tissue. With the consideration of plasma dosage and heat damage on the skin tissue, DC bias voltage is a better approach compared with the common approach of increasing the plasma power. Since the DC voltage is easy to apply on the human body, it is a promising approach for use in clincial applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dielectric barrier discharge is attractive for air pollution control, except for its low energy efficiency and high operating voltage. For the sake of commercial use, multineedle to plane electrodes is investigated in this paper, and its optimization is achieved both by simulation and experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]