Energy of Reactions in Atmospheric-pressure Plasma Polymerization with Inert Carrier Gas

A large reactor for performing dielectric barrier discharges (DBD) experiments at atmospheric pressure (AP) has been built and tested. The area of electrodes is more than 40 times greater than that of a small DBD cell, in which we have perfected a method formeasuring Eg, the energy dissipated per cycle of the applied a.c. high voltage, Va(f). This methodology has been successfully applied to plasma polymerization experiments on the larger system, using volatile organic precursors (dopants) at ‰ concentrations in 10 standard liters per minute of argon (Ar). We measured ΔEg, the energy difference with and without dopant, for Va(f) ∼ 3 kVrms (20 ≤ f ≤ 40 kHz). From ΔEg we then derived Etot/N, the energy per molecule, and observed surprisingly good agreement with data published in the literature relating to low-pressure (LP) plasmas.