Electrical characteristics of atmospheric-pressure DBD in argon with small admixtures of TMS - measured and calculated data

A time-dependent, spatially one-dimensional fluid-Poisson model has been applied to analyse the impact of small amounts of tetramethylsilane (TMS) on the discharge characteristics of an atmospheric-pressure dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) in argon. Based on an established argon kinetics, it includes a reaction kinetics for TMS, which has been validated by measurements of the ignition voltage at the frequency f = 86.2 kHz for TMS amounts of up to 200 ppm. It is found that good agreement between measured and calculated ignition voltage can be obtained, when assuming that 25 % of the reactions of TMS with excited argon atoms with a rate coefficient of 3.0×10^{−16} m^3/s lead to the production of electrons due to Penning ionization. The dataset contains measured and calculated data for the ignition voltage and discharge current.