Excimer Lamp Pumped by a Triggered Discharge
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ENTE PER LE NUOVE TECNOLOGIE, L'ENERGIA E L'AMBIENTE Dipartimento Innovazione ET f\T- - 9k 13 EXCIMER LAMP PUMPED BY A TRIGGERED DISCHARGE G. BALDACCHINI, S. BOLLANTI, P. Dl LAZZARO, F. FLORA, G. GIORDANO, T. LETARDI, A. RENIERI, G. SCHINA Centro Ricerche Frascati, Roma G. CLEMENTI, F. MUZZI, C.E. ZHENG EL.EN., (Electronic Engineering), Firenze MASTER DISTRIBUTION OF THIS DOCUMENT IS UNLIMITED FOREIGN SALES PROHIBITED RT/INN/96/13 DISCLAIMER Portions of this document may be illegible in electronic image products. Images are produced from the best available original document ABSTRACT Radiation characteristics and discharge performances of an excimer lamp are described. The discharge of the HCl/Xe gas mixture at an atmospheric pres sure, occurring near the quartz tube wall, is initiated by a trigger wire. A maximum total UV energy of about 0.4 J in a (0.8-0.9) ps pulse, radiated from a 10 cm discharge length, is obtained with a total discharge input energy of 8 J. Excimer lamps are the preferred choice for medical and material processing ir radiations, when the monochromaticity orcoherence of U V light is not required, due to their low cost, reliability and easy mantainance. (DISCHARGE UV LAMP). RIASSUNTO In questo iavoro vengono illustrate le caratteristiche di eccitazione e di emissione radiativa di ima lampada ad eccimeri. La scarica di eccitazione e innescata da un filo ad alia lensione e si sviluppa vicino alia parete del tubo di quarzo in una miscela di gas HCl/Xe a pressione atmosferica. Con un’energsa d; 8 J depositata dalla scarica in una lampada lunga 10 cm, si ottiene un’cnergia massima irraggiata nell’ultravioletto di 0.4 J in un impulse di 0.8-0.9 ps di durata. L’affidabihta e il basso costo tipici delle lampade ad eccimeri le rende competitive nelle appltcaziom industriali (per es. medicale e lavorazione materiali) die non richiedono monocromaticita della luce UV. INDICE 1. Introduction...............................................................................................................................1 2. Experimental arrangement description .................................. 2 3. Measurements for discharge performances and UV-radiation output....................... 4 4. Maximum attainable UV-power density and its spatial distribution .... 11 5. Discussion.......................................................................................................................... 15 6. Summary.......................................................................................................................... 20 Appendix ....................................... 20 References 22 EXCIMER LAMP PUMPED BY A TRIGGERED DISCHARGE 1 - INTRODUCTION Ultraviolet (UV) radiations have been proved very efficient for initiating some chemical or physical processes, and they have already found many applications both for medical purposes and in some industrial processes. Between the two different types of UV radiation sources mainly used now, the UV-lasers can have an output brightness, much higher than that for the other type: UV -fluorescence lamps. However in some cases, especially when the processes do not require the coherence or the monochromaticity of the light, the UV-lamps, (for exam ples, mercury lamps) are often the preferred choice for applications, owing to their low cost, simplicity, reliability, and easy maintenance. Recently, due to more and more photo-initiated or photo-assisted processes being evolved, a revived interest has been stimulated for developing new UV-discharge lamps, such as various excimer lamps!1-9 !. With these excimer lamps, the spectral widths of the fluorescence radiations are much narrower than those from the mercury lamps! 10!, and this may lead to a more efficient excitation of some interesting processes. The excimer lamps can be pumped by several different discharge excitation modes, such as the microwave discharges! 3’4!, dielectric-barrier discharges! 1,5,6,9 ! the pulsed dis charges which include axial discharges! 2,7! and transverse discharges! 8!, and so on. The microwave discharge can give a quasi-continuous UV-radiation output with high efficiency, while the pump system and its energy coupling design are rather com 1 plicated, compared to the other types of the excitation modes. Using pulsed discharges along the axial direction of the lamp tube, the lamp con struction is simple, but the discharge gas pressure is usually limited in the order of 102 torrl2,7!. Thus, the total UV-radiation intensity can not be very high. When using transverse discharges with ultraviolet preionization, a UV-fluorescence output of up to several kW/cm2, measured at the distance very near to the window, has been achieved from a gas medium with pressure higher than one atmosphere®, and the lamp in this case is like a small laser discharge chamber. For dielectric-barrier discharges (microdischarges), the lamp can work at high gas pressure with a very efficient incoherent UV-output. The discharge in the lamps takes the form of many statistically distributed, both in time and in space, filaments and each filament causes a surface discharge on the surface of the inter-electrode dielectric material. Although the spacing of the discharge is limited in the order of a few mm for a typical discharge voltage of 104 V with the dielectric thickness of several mm, the discharge-distributed area can be scaled to a large dimension with different configura tions for UV-processingt1,5 ’6,9!. Some lamps directly use the inter-electrode dielectric materials, for example, quartz as the UV-output window to simplify the structure, and in this case the surface discharge etching or electrode sputtering on the dielectric surface may cause the window-transparency problem, leading to a decrease of the UV-output. It is well known that the high voltage trigger wires have been used for a long time in some flash-tubes or lamps (see for example, [11,12]), to improve the discharge stability and the energy coupling. In this work, we present some UV-fluorescence radiation results, obtained with this kind of triggered, pulsed discharges in a quartz tubes, filled with HCl/Xe mixture up to atmospheric pressure. Some data, obtained at low pressure without using triggering, are also described for comparison. 2 - EXPERIMENTAL ARRANGEMENT DESCRIPTION A schematic view of the experimental set-up used in this work is shown in Fig. 1. The electric discharge modulator consists of a three-stage pulse forming network (PFN), a thyratron (EG&G, 8614, HY-5, 40 kV/5kA), and a charge inductance L\. In order to take into account the future application needs, where the modulator and the lamp may be separated for a distance for putting the lamp as near as possible to the radiated object to obtain the largest fluorescence radiation power density, a three-meter, 50-fi 2 Discharge modulator Discharge tube >-(- Th Trigger V Figure 1. Schematic of the experimental setup with a three-stage PFN. C q = 0.0135 fiF, L0 = 0.15 /tH, CT = 0.6 nF, L% = 50 \iH. cable Ca is used to electrically connect the modulator to the discharge tube. Tr is a electrically conductive wire with a diameter of ~ 1.5 mm, which lies parallel and near to the lamp tube. Tr and the capacitance Ct = 0.6 nF are used for triggering the discharge. The circuit can be operated at the repetition rate of up to ~ 100 Hz, limited by the DC charge power supply. The discharge tube is made of quartz glass with an inner diameter of 1.8 cm. Two electrodes, whose outer diameters are both 1 cm, are made of tantalum foils with thickness of 0.1 mm. Several different distances Id between the two electrodes are tried, but most of the measurements are made using ld = 10cm. The UV-radiations are generally observed at a distance of Ss = 60 cm from the center of the discharge tube. The UV signal-receiver is set at this position, consisting of a biplanar phototube (ITT FW-114A), with a 3 mm-thick coloured glass filter (Schott UG-11) Fcoi in front, together with some neutral density filters. The transmittance Tugn of Fcoi is shown in Fig. 2. All the filters are calibrated by a spectrometer (PERKIN ELMER UV/VIS/NIR Lambda 19). A 2 mm-thick colour filter WG320 and a multi-layer dielectric coated quartz mirror Mr are also used as filters in order to study the spectral distributions of the UV- radiation. The transmittances Twg320 for WG320 and Tmr for Mr are given in Fig. 2. 3 100 Twg320 Wavelength (nm) Figure 2. Transmittances of UG11 (—), WG320 (-•-•) and Mr (-------) vs wavelength A. The UV-radiation energy is determined by convolving the phototube response S'pt'(A) with the filter transmittance and with the time-integrated emission spectra, and also taking into account the limited surface area of the phototube through a geometrical factor Q,a (see Appendix). 3 - MEASUREMENTS FOR DISCHARGE PERFORMANCES AND UV- RADIATION OUTPUT We brief some results in Part A, obtained without using discharge triggering wire, to see what is the main limitation for a further increase of the fluorescence energy in this case. The other two parts B and C give the results obtained using the discharge triggering. A. UV-Fluorescence Output without Discharge Triggering The measurements in this case are done using the same setup described before, but the trigger wire Tr (Fig. 1) is kept far from the lamp, so that the influence of the field established between the wire Tr and the lamp electrodes can be neglected compared to that between the electrodes. 4 Total gas pressure Ptot (torr) Figure 3. Total UV-radiation energy vs the total gas pressure for the gas mixtures of HCl/Xe/Ne = 1/4/10 (•), 1/4/5 (o), and 1/4/3 (A), respectively, with Vc = 20 kV, Id = 27 cm. Fig. 3 shows the measured total UV radiation energy of the lamp vs the total gas pressure Ptot for several different HCl/Xe/Ne gas mixtures. Clearly, the fluorescence energy increases with the total gas pressure, and the maximum pressure Ptot, which we could have for normal discharges, is determined by the onset of discharge instability.