Atomic oxygen densities in parallel plate radio frequency driven He/O2 micro-scaled atmospheric pressure plasma jets: a systematic model validation study

Reactive species produced by atmospheric pressure plasma jets have high application potential in the fields of biomedicine and surface processing. An extensive validation between the simulation results in this work and measurement data from various research groups is carried out in order to reliably understand the complicated chemical kinetics defining the reactive species densities. Atomic oxygen densities in parallel plate radio frequency driven He/O2 micro-scaled atmospheric pressure plasma jets have been measured in the literature by several research groups with different methods including: two-photon absorption laser induced fluorescence (TALIF) spectroscopy and optical emission spectroscopy-based methods. These measurement data with a variation of the absorbed power, the He gas flow rate and the O2 mixture ratio are simulated in this paper with a plasma-chemical plug-flow model coupled with a two-term Boltzmann equation solver. The simulated atomic oxygen densities are generally in good agreement with the measured ones. Specifically, particularly good agreement is achieved between the simulations and most of the TALIF measurements over a range of operating conditions. The model prediction accuracy relative to a subset of the TALIF measurements is quantified by the percentage error between the measured and simulated atomic oxygen densities. An approximate normal distribution is observed in the histogram plot of the percentage error, and the mean is close to zero. The mean is shifted positively and negatively in the case of removing important atomic oxygen gain and loss channels, which implies the underestimation and overestimation of the simulation results relative to the measurement data, respectively. This indicates that proper incorporation of the dominant reaction channels in the simulations plays a key role in the model prediction accuracy, as expected. The manual analysis of the quantitative influence of the dominant reaction channels on the model prediction accuracy demonstrated in this work provides a basis for further studies on improving plasma-chemical reaction schemes based on systematic comparisons with large experimental data sets.