Parametric study of dielectric barrier discharge excimer UV lamps supplied with controlled square current pulses

Abstract

A parametric study of a system dedicated to non-coherent UV emission, by means of DBD excilamps, supplied by a controlled square shape current source is proposed. The presentation highlights on the one hand the performances experimentally obtained by combining together a set of 20 different bulbs with different diameters, gap and wall thicknesses (all the bulbs have the same length and are filled with the same Xe-Cl gas mixture), with different electrical power supplying conditions: magnitude, frequency (in the 30 kHz – 200 kHz range) and duty cycle of the square shape current pulses injected into the bulb. The performances concern the average UV power, the efficiency of the bulb conversion (electrical power to UV) and the adjustability of the power. On the second hand, we present design considerations of the power supply which has been especially developed for the purpose of these experiments