This paper presents the initial characterization of a new burner design to study the effect of non-thermal plasma
discharge on combustion characteristics at atmospheric pressure. The burner allows stabilizing an inverted cone
flame in a mixture flowing through a perforated plate designed as a microplasma reactor. The design principle of
the microplasma reactor is based on the dielectric barrier discharge scheme which helps to generate a stable nonthermal
plasma discharge driven by nanosecond high-voltage pulses in the burner holes. The consumed power
and pulse energy have been calculated from simultaneously measurements of current and voltage of the electrical
pulses. Time-resolved measurements of direct emission spectra for nitrogen second positive system N2(C-B)
have been done to determine the rotational and vibrational temperatures of the plasma discharge. By fitting the
spectra with SPECAIR simulation data, it was found that the rotational and vibrational temperatures are 480 K
and 3700 K, respectively, for the discharge in methane-air mixture with an equivalence ratio of 0.5 at atmospheric
pressure. The influence of a high-voltage (5 kV) pulsed nanosecond discharge on the laminar burning
velocity of methane-air flame has been investigated over a range of equivalence ratios (0.55–0.75). The laminar
burning velocity was calculated by the conical flame area method which has been validated by other published
data. CH* chemiluminescence image analysis has been applied to accurately determine the flame area. The
results show an increase of the burning velocity of about 100% in very lean (Φ= 0.55) flames as a result of the
plasma discharge effect