Dielectric Barrier Discharge (DBD) excimer lamp is a very attractive source for Ultraviolet (UV) radiation. It has a number of advantages compared to the mercury lamp which is the main lamp used in the industry for UV production. Some of these advantages are instant UV radiation (no warm-up period), narrow UV spectrum, longer life times and simple construction. The DBD UV lamp can be used in number of applications like water disinfection, Plasma Display Panels (PDP) and surface treatment in the semiconductor industry. Yet, the full industrial application of this lamp still faces some problems mainly related to finding the optimum electrical driver to maximize the efficiency of such a lamp. This includes the type of the electrical waveform to generate and the power electronic driver to produce it.
In this thesis, firstly a physically based circuit model for the DBD lamp using the Finite Volume Method (FVM) is developed. This model provides the electrical and optical characteristics of the lamp. Using this model the sensitivity of the lamp efficiency to the proposed electrical waveform has been determined. Secondly, the order of this FVM model has been reduced to obtain a model which is used in the design procedure of the proposed driver.
Since the DBD lamp has a capacitive nature, a current controlled driver is proposed in this thesis as opposed to most of the published drivers which are voltage controlled drivers. The design of this driver is intended to enhance the electrical to optical efficiency of the lamp and therefore enhancing the overall efficiency of the system. The driver topology permits direct control of the peak lamp current and the operating frequency of the supplied current to the DBD lamp. The width of the current pulses is determined by the transformer magnetizing inductance and the lamp capacitance.
Experimental results of the proposed driver connected to a XeCl DBD lamp are presented to validate the performance of the driver and to prove the concept of such a current controlled driver. The proposed driver performance is compared to a voltage source driver which was also implemented. The proposed driver produced higher overall system efficiency but at the expense of a reduction in the driver efficiency as compared to the voltage source driver.
The complete system, which consists of the developed FVM based model and the equivalent circuit of the proposed driver, was simulated and the results were compared to the experimental results to validate the accuracy of the developed model for the DBD lamp.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/24745 |
| Date | 12 August 2010 |
| Creators | El-Deib, Amgad |
| Contributors | Dawson, Francis P., Lavers, John Douglas |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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