Experimental investigation of Lissajous figure shapes in planar and surface dielectric barrier discharges

Abstract

Dielectric Barrier Discharges (DBDs) operating in air at atmospheric pressure are widely employed as cold plasma sources for plasma processing and applications, in both volume and surface configurations. Surface dielectric barrier discharges, however, are mainly known for the manipulation of the boundary layer of an airflow surrounding a body, and thus for aeronautical applications. Lissajous figures, obtained by means of a high-voltage and a capacitive probes, are usually adopted for both these types of DBDs as a method for measuring the power consumption by the discharge. In this work, we propose to integrate this diagnostic tool with the measurement of current pulses, which are associated to microdischarges that usually develop in these plasmas because of the presence of the dielectric barrier. We have studied both planar and surface DBDs in presence of a continuous sinusoidal voltage feeding, and we have demonstrated that this method is promising in order to gain additional information about the discharge characteristics from the shape of the Lissajous figures.