Numerical and experimental investigation of light emissions of a planar nitrogen atmospheric-pressure dielectric barrier discharge due to addition of ammonia considering oxygen impurity

In this paper, the mechanisms of light emissions, including NO-γ, NO-β and N2-SPS, produced in a N2/NH3 atmospheric-pressure dielectric barrier discharge considering realistic oxygen impurity (30 ppm) are investigated numerically and experimentally. Self-consistent, one-dimensional fluid modeling is used to numerically simulate the discharge process with 48 species and 235 reaction channels. An optical emission spectrometer (OES) is used to measure the relative intensities of the light emission. The simulations of the light emission intensities for the above-mentioned OES lines generally reproduce the trends observed in the experiments caused by changes in the NH3 concentration. All of the predicted intensities of NO-γ, NO-β and N2-SPS decrease with increasing amount of NH3 caused by various reaction mechanisms. The former is due to the loss of N2(A) and NO(A) by the reaction of NH3 with N2(A) and NO(A), respectively. The decrease in NO-β is due to the depletion of N and O because of NH3, and the decrease in N2-SPS is due to electron attachment to NH3 and a weaker metastable–metastable associative ionization of N2. All of the simulated results demonstrate that the discharges are typically Townsend-like because the ions outnumber the electrons and the electric field across the gap is distorted only slightly by the charged particles during the breakdown. Finally, a reduced chemical kinetics model for a planar atmospheric-pressure N2/O2/NH3 dielectric barrier discharge is proposed and validated by benchmarking against the above complete chemical kinetics. This results in a reduced chemical kinetics consisting of 33 species and 87 reactions with a very limited loss of accuracy of discharge properties, while it is 2.1 times faster in computational time as compared with the complete version. (paper)