Abstract
A macroscopic plasma display panel cell is employed to study the striation phenomenon occurring in the discharge of a much smaller commercial AC-plasma display panel (PDPs) cell. The macro-cell is designed based on the scaling law with a scaling factor of 50. The honeycomb shaped macro-cell has symmetric coplanar T-shaped electrodes and a data electrode asymmetrically placed with an offset in direction perpendicular to the cathode-to-anode direction, i.e., the data electrode is not placed on the central line of the cell. Measurement of images by an intensified charged coupled device (ICCD) camera shows that the asymmetric electric field profile due to asymmetric electrode configuration causes the development of striations quite asymmetric on the anode. Pulse width and sustain voltage of the driving waveform are also changed to study how charge accumulation effect influences the striation development profile. Some interesting phenomena such as the interference- like phenomenon of striation and “branching” of striation development are observed under some specific range of parameter values. The non-local properties of the striation are discussed based on the observed phenomena. Simulation based on fluid model is conducted to show the discharge conditions on the anode during the development of striation to determine if the electron kinetics is in the non-local regime. The possible mechanism for striation formation arisen from the non-locality of electron kinetics in AC-PDP is also discussed. Some important characteristics derived from this mechanism for striation formation indicate that wall charge accumulation process in the previous pulse is quite important to the development of striation. In view of this, we can show that while a little asymmetry is imposed on the electric field, different “mode” of discharge evolution profile can be simply induced by varying the sustain voltage and pulse width of driving waveform.