Plasma dynamics, instabilities and OH generation in a pulsed atmospheric pressure plasma with liquid cathode: A diagnostic study

Yuanfu Yue, Vighneswara Siva Santosh Kumar Kondeti, Nader Sadeghi, Peter J. Bruggeman

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

22 Scopus citations

Abstract

While plasma-liquid interactions have been an important focus in the plasma research community, the impact of the strong coupling between plasma and liquid on plasma properties and processes remains not fully understood. In this work, we report on the impact of the applied voltage, pulse width and liquid conductivity on the plasma morphology and the OH generation for a positive pulsed DC atmospheric pressure plasma jet with He-0.1% H2O mixture interacting with a liquid cathode. We adopted diagnostic techniques of fast imaging, 2D laser induced fluorescence of OH and Thomson scattering spectroscopy. We show that plasma instabilities and enhanced evaporation occur and have a significant impact on the OH generation. At elevated plasma energies, it is found that the plasma contracts due to a thermal instability through Ohmic heating and the contraction coincides with a depletion in the OH density in the core due to electron impact dissociation. For lower plasma energies, the instability is suppressed/delayed by the equivalent series resistor of the liquid electrode. An estimation of the energy flux from the plasma to the liquid shows that the energy flux of the ions released into the liquid by positive ion hydration is dominant, and significantly larger than the energy needed to evaporate sufficient amount of water to account for the measured H2O concentration increase near the plasma-liquid interface.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number025008
JournalPlasma Sources Science and Technology
Volume31
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The research has been supported by the Department of Energy, Office of Fusion Energy Sciences (DE-SC0016053).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 IOP Publishing Ltd.

Keywords

  • OH depletion
  • Thomson scattering
  • enhanced evaporation
  • laser induced fluorescence
  • plasma-liquid interaction
  • thermal instability

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