Contaminant gas removal using thin-film Ti electrode microdischarges

摘要

We report a method for the selective chemisorption of oxygen and nitrogen in sealed cavities utilizing microdischarges between thin-film Ti electrodes. The method is used to remove contaminating air from both inert and organic gas environments, reducing the nitrogen and oxygen concentrations by factors of 50 and 16, respectively. A microchip-based optical emission spectroscopic sensor is used to monitor the purification. The purification improves the ability of the optical emission sensor to detect carbon by a factor of 8. The method has been tested at temperatures between 23 and 200 ℃.