Atmospheric pressure of nitrogen plasmas in a ferroelectric packed bed barrier discharge reactor. Part I. Modeling

Numerical modelling of ferroelectric packed bed nonthermal plasma reactor has been conducted to predict plasma parameters in a pure nitrogen environment. Simplified time averaged one-dimensional physical model based on Poisson's equation for electric field and transport equation for electrons was developed. The mean electron energy was obtained by a swarm relationship from calculated electric field profiles and plasma neutral conditions. For chemical model, N/sup +/, N/sub 2//sup +/, N/sub 3//sup +/, N/sub 4//sup +/, N/sup */, N/sub 2//sup */ and electron were considered where N/sup */ and N/sub 2//sup */ are the total excited atoms and molecules, respectively. The results show that all the plasma parameters increase with increasing applied AC voltage and pellet dielectric constant. The numerical results also show that the dominant ion is N/sub 4//sup +/ and the metastable molecule density is much higher than radical and the electron densities at atmospheric gas pressure.