Effect of E-Field on the Length of a Plasma Jet

Plasma jet device, which generates plasma in open space rather than in a confined electrode gap only, attracts lots of attention recently. The generation of a plasma jet could be a gas flow phenomenon, an electrical phenomenon, or both. In this paper, the effect of electric field on the length of a special designed plasma jet is investigated. The plasma jet is driven by a pulsed direct current (DC) power supply. Simulation of the electric potential along the plasma jet shows that the electric potential difference along the 4 cm plasma jet is about 400 volts for applied voltage of 4 kV. This is consistent with the measured electric potential along the plasma jet. Besides, the experiment results also show that the length of the plasma jet reaches its maximum when the pulse width is about 1 mus . According to the measured current-voltage curves, it could be concluded that the effect of pulse width on the length of the plasma jet is solely due to the electric field effect.