Dielectric barrier discharge using nitric acid modified silicone rubber

It is proved that the dielectric barrier is one of the factors which can affect the discharge property in dielectric barrier discharge (DBD). And it has been proved experimentally that the more are the shallow traps (< 1 eV) on the surface of the dielectric barrier, the higher is the pressure range of uniform discharge. Besides the properly selection of the dielectric barriers, the surface modification of the dielectric materials such as the corona modification of silicone rubber which used to obtain more shallow traps has been proved to be a very useful method for realizing a uniform discharge with wider pressure range. In this paper, nitric acid modification on the silicone rubber was employed and compared with corona treatment. The results from thermal stimulated current (TSC) experiment show that the nitric acid modified silicone rubber gains more shallow traps on the surface than the corona treated one. And a wider pressure range of uniform discharge is achieved while using the nitric acid modified silicone rubber as dielectric barrier compared with the corona modified one. Therefore, it is concluded that nitric acid modification on the silicone rubber is not only an effective way on the improvement of the discharge property but also better than the method of corona modification.