Study of a Filamentary Dielectric Barrier Discharge in Air at Atmospheric Pressure

Dielectric Barrier Discharges (DBD) at atmospheric pressure have many applications, for instance ozone production, surface treatment, and waste gas treatment. Generally, such a discharge is filamentary but it can be diffuse under particular conditions. Understanding the formation of the filament, which is an ionization wave or so-called ``streamer'', is very hard theoretically, numerically, and experimentally. This is due, first, to the non-linearity of the equations concerned, and second, because of the scaling in space and time of this phenomenon: a streamer has a radius on the order of a few microns, and propagates through distances of several centimeters in a few nanoseconds. In this study we will present the results obtained in experiments and in simulations for a plane-to-plane DBD. We electrically characterized this device and have observed collective effects that are still poorly understood. A point-to-plane DBD has also been studied for producing a much more localized discharge. In parallel with the experimental study we have developed a numerical model based on the Immersed Boundary Method (IBM) to introduce an electrode having a complex geometry into a structured Cartesian mesh. The first results of the code will be discussed.