Characteristics of pulsed nanosecond discharge excited by compact solid-state pulse forming line at atmospheric pressure air

Abstract Non-equilibrium plasma is a promising technology for the generation of ozone and removal of exhausted fuel gases. However, applications of non-equilibrium plasma are restricted by energy utilization efficiency in many industry fields. Discharge excited by nanosecond pulsed power is regarded as one of the most efficient methods. In this study, a compact five stages stacked Blumlein pulse forming line and photoconductive semiconductor switches-based power source was introduced to generate pulsed plasma. This compact source could achieve over 50 kV with 10.1 ns pulse width and 4.8 ns pulse rising time. Coaxial cylindrical reactor was employed to generate a pulsed streamer discharge driven by the nanosecond pulsed source in atmospheric pressure air. Electrical parameters of the streamer discharge have been obtained in this study, the instantaneous power dissipation exceeds 8 MW and the average energy consumption of each pulse exceeds 56 mJ. Experiments of high speed photography have been conducted to observe the evolution process. It can be found that streamer heads start from the central wire electrode and then head to the grounded cylinder electrode in all radial direction of the coaxial electrode. Triple wire-to-cylinder electrodes discharge shows that all the three coaxial discharges develop synchronously and symmetrically, which shows that is capable of generating large volume non-equilibrium diffusive streamer discharge plasma.