Modeling of Atmospheric-Pressure Dielectric Barrier Discharges in Argon with Small Admixtures of Tetramethylsilane

Abstract

A time-dependent, spatially one-dimensional fluid-Poisson model is applied to analyze the impact of small amounts of tetramethylsilane (TMS) as precursor on the discharge characteristics of an atmospheric-pressure dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) in argon. Based on an established reaction kinetics for argon, it includes a plasma chemistry for TMS, which is validated by measurements of the ignition voltage at the frequency f=86.2kHz for TMS amounts of up to 200 ppm. Details of both a reduced Ar-TMS reaction kinetics scheme and an extended plasma-chemistry model involving about 60 species and 580 reactions related to TMS are given. It is found that good agreement between measured and calculated data can be obtained, when assuming that 25% of the reactions of TMS with excited argon atoms with a rate coefficient of 3.0×10−16m3/s lead to the production of electrons due to Penning ionization. Modeling results for an applied voltage Ua,0=4kV show that TMS is depleted during the residence time of the plasma in the DBD, where the percentage consumption of TMS decreases with increasing TMS fraction because only a finite number of excited argon species is available to dissociate and/or ionize the precursor via energy transfer. Main species resulting from that TMS depletion are presented and discussed. In particular, the analysis clearly indicates that trimethylsilyl cations can be considered to be mainly responsible for the film formation.