Influences of the inner diameter of the solid shielding tube on the characteristics of the radio-frequency cold atmospheric plasma jet

Active control of the local environment of the cold atmospheric plasma (CAP) jet is of great importance in actual applications since the CAP operates in an open atmosphere with the inevitable entrainment of the surrounding cold air. In this paper, the solid shielding effects of the cylindrical quartz tubes with different inner diameters on the characteristics of the CAP jets driven by a radio-frequency (RF) power supply are studied experimentally. The experimental results show that the total length of the shielded plasma jet can be increased significantly by an appropriate combination of the quartz tube inner diameter and that of the plasma generator nozzle exit with other parameters being unchanged. This phenomenon may be qualitatively attributed to the loss of diffusion of the charged particles in the radial direction under different inner diameters of the quartz tubes. Compared with the plasma free jet, the plasma shielding jet is produced with optimized parameters including longer plasma jet length, higher concentrations of chemically reactive species, higher rotational, vibrational, and electron excitation temperatures when the inner diameters of the solid shielding tube and the generator nozzle exit are the same. A maximum plasma jet length of 52.0 cm is obtained in contrast to that of 5.0 cm of the plasma free jet in this study. The experimental results indicate that the solid shielding effect provides a new method for the active control of the local environment of the RF-CAP jet operating in an open atmosphere.