Glow discharges energy

Diagnostic techniques that involve natural emissions are appHcable to plasmas of all sizes and temperatures and clearly do not perturb the plasma conditions. These are especially useful for the small, high temperature plasmas employed in inertial fusion energy research, but are also finding increased use in understanding the glow discharges so widely used commercially. 

Figure 4. Calculated energy distribution of the argon ions at the cathode of a glow discharge in a mixture of 99% argon and 1 % nitrogen for two different optically measured cathode dark space lengths...

Adhesion or printability of polymeric surfaces, including films, is often promoted by plasma or glow discharge treatment. In particular for apolar (low surface energy) surfaces such as polyolefins this is a commonly applied procedure. As a practical industrial example, the adhesion behaviour of polypropylenes after... 

Yet another approach is to influence the combustion process itself by ionization, pulsed electromagnetic fields, glow discharge etc. The Institute of Energy at Dnepropetrovsk State University developed a plasma-activated sparking plug, currently in preparation for a full-scale production. 

Schematically the apparatus used for sputtering consists of a bell jar maintained at a reduced pressure of an inert gas such as argon. The gas is subjected to a potential difference of several kilovolts, producing a glow discharge from which positive ions are accelerated towards the target (the cathode). These high-energy ions remove...

In thin film processes for microelectronic applications, we deal almost exclusively with glow discharges. These plasmas are characterized by pressures in the range of 50 mTorr to 5 Torr, electron densities between 10 and 10 cm , and average electron energies between 1 and 10 eV (such ener-... 

It should be noted that a Maxwellian form of fie) is a reasonable approximation to the actual distribution at low electron energies. This observation is indicated in Figure 5 i24). However, the first ionization potential of most atoms and molecules is above eV. Thus, many of the important homogeneous processes that occur in glow discharges, such as ionization, take place as a result of high energy electrons in the "tail" of the distribution. These electrons are precisely the ones that are not adequately described by a Maxwellian distribution function. 

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