Spatiotemporal evolution and its impact on the deposition behavior of atmospheric TEOS/O2/Ar plasma: A numerical study

Atmospheric dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) is a promising approach for large-area deposition, whose spatiotemporal evolution determines the deposition rate and film chemistry. To investigate the relationship between the discharge and deposition behavior of tetraethoxysilane/oxygen/argon (TEOS/O2 ${\text{O}}_{2}$/Ar) DBD, a one-dimensional (1D) fluid model was constructed and experimentally verified. The calculation results reveal that TEOS mainly affects the discharge behavior via Penning ionization, while O2 ${\text{O}}_{2}$ mainly affects discharge via attachment reaction. Penning ionization reduces the excited Ar and the attachment reaction reduces the number of discharges in half voltage cycles. As a result, merely increasing the concentration of TEOS or O2 ${\text{O}}_{2}$ may not proportionally increase the deposition rate of relevant reactive species. In atmospheric-pressure plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition, the gas composition determines the spatiotemporal evolution of discharge and further affects the deposition behavior. To study the impact of spatiotemporal evolution on deposition behavior, a one-dimensional (1D) tetraethoxysilane/oxygen/argon (TEOS/O2/Ar) fluid model was constructed and experimentally verified in this work.image