Characterisation of hydrogen peroxide production in a cold atmospheric pressure dielectric barrier discharge

Dielectric Barrier Discharges are used to investigate the production of hydrogen peroxide. Dielectric barriers limit the maximum current, causing microdischarges with the lifetime of nanoseconds. Water vapor in the gas flow of the plasma is responsible for a complex chemistry, leading to the formation of OH radicals and subsequently hydrogen peroxide. Energy efficiency of processes allows to compare fundamentally different discharges. Hence understanding power dissipation is of high importance. However, power measurements generally include system losses as well, which reflects on the energy efficiency. In this work, these losses have been considered and a method to estimate the discharge power is presented. Besides the power, the production of hydrogen peroxide under the influence of discharge gap size, gas residence time and the used gas admixture is studied.