Fabrication and Electrical Characterization of Microscale Dielectric Barrier Discharge Devices

In this paper we report the microfabrication and electrical characterization of microscale dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma devices on glass substrates. The devices employ Au electrodes (5 mm long, ≤ 40 μm wide) separated by a polyimide dielectric (10 µm or 50 µm thick). Under ac sinusoidal excitation at 14 kHz, the plasma discharges ignite around 1 kV_pk input amplitude. The power consumption of a single device is on the order of 3 – 6 mW/mm and power delivery is found to increase linearly when multiple devices are connected in parallel. The effective plasma load impedance is extracted from the measured voltage/current waveforms, and the parameters for a parallel R-C load model are computed. Since most of the tested devices sustained plasma for only a few minutes before failure, reliability of the devices is also briefly discussed.