Two dimensional model of MW induced Ar plasma for fibre production

Microwave induced plasmas (MIPs) are widely employed for the purpose of deposition. One such usage is deposition on inner surface of glass tubes, which is the first step in the production of optical fibres. The setup contains a mixture of SiCl4 and O2 gases at 1000 Pa pressure and 1500 K gas temperature. It is composed of a deposition reactor covering a hollow cylindrical quartz tube and the reactor is fed with a rectangular waveguide. The plasma is formed inside this tube with continuous gas flow. In order to confine the electromagnetic (EM) waves, the reactor contains two chokes at both ends. In this contribution we present modeling results of such a setup in two dimensions using the Plasimo modeling platform [1]. In this initial study we have considered plasmas in argon. For the description of the MIP, the non-local-thermal-equilibrium (non-LTE) model solves particle, momentum and energy balance equations of certain species in conjunction with the EM-model for wave propagation and absorption [2]. The confinement of the EM-waves depends on the choke depth and its optimum value depends on the plasma quantities (e.g. electron density and collision frequency of momentum transfer). This implies that the coupling between the plasma and the EM-waves must be treated self-consistently, as realized in this study. We present the power response of the plasma as function of the choke depth and determine the optimum depth. Additionally, we show the corresponding distributions for the EM-fields, electron temperature and electron density for various points of the power response curve. References 1. van Dijk J., Peerenboom K., Jimenez-Diaz M., Mihailova D. and van der Mullen, J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys., 42(19), 194012, 2009. 2. Jimenez-Diaz M., van Dijk J., Carbone E. A. D. and van der Mullen J. J. A. M. J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys., 2012 To be summite