Abstract
Glow discharge has lots of attractive properties, such as lower discharge sustaining voltage, no generation of ozone, and so on. And more, ionizer was developed recently using an atmospheric pressure glow discharge. On the other hand, ionizer needs a compressed or blown air to transport ion for charged objects. This air is very useful in explosive hazardous area to prevent the explosion of flammable gas and/or vapor by ignition sources, e.g. electrical spark. In this paper, we investigated the ionizing characteristic of atmospheric pressure glow discharge by controlled air flow rate from 5 liters to 60 liters a minute, and compared with decay time between the corona discharge and glow discharge as a function of some direction and distance from discharge ion source. We confirmed that an air flow rate needs 25 liters a minute to sustain the most suitable atmospheric pressure glow discharge and to increase an ionizing efficiency.