1D fluid simulations of a helium-xenon filled AC plasma display panel

• Published in: International Conference on Plasma Science (papers in summary form only received) pp. 187 - 188
• Main Authors: Veerasingam, R., Campbell, R.B., McGrath, R.T.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 1995
• Subjects: Electrons; Flat panel displays; Metastasis; Plasma displays; Plasma simulation; Poisson equations; Voltage
• ISBN: 0780326695; 9780780326699
• ISSN: 0730-9244; 2576-7208
• DOI: 10.1109/PLASMA.1995.531689

Summary form only given, as follows. A one dimensional multi-species fluid model has been developed to analyze the operation of an ac plasma display panel (AC PDP) that is filled with a helium-xenon Penning mixture. The AC PDP is a promising candidate in the flat panel display industry especially for information displays having large screen areas. A PDP consists of a matrix of gas cells operating at pressures of several hundred Torr. In each cell a micro discharge is initiated using special driving circuitry that typically have address, sustain and erase pulse wave forms. The AC PDP has a memory characteristic which eliminates the need for a refresh pulse once a cell has been addressed. To ensure that a single sustain pulse can maintain a cell in the ON or OFF state, a large memory margin is essential. The model includes continuity equations for helium metastables, decaying helium excited species, helium ions, xenon metastable species, decaying xenon excited species, xenon ions, xenon dimers and electrons, a wall charge equation, Poisson's equation and a circuit equation. The model is used to calculate the voltage transfer curves, maximum sustain voltage, minimum sustain voltage and the bi-stable margin for the panel. The voltage transfer curves yield the first on and first off voltages from which the operation of the panel can be systematically described. Using a fully implicit method allows multi-pulse calculations to be performed in a reasonable amount of time and give the same values for first on and first off voltages in the He/Xe mixture calculations. In a multi-pulse simulation of the first on voltage, the model predicts the growth in wall charge until the panel turns on as has been observed in experiments. The advantage of using a fluid description which uses the local field approximation (LFA) to calculate the collisional electron driven excitation and ionization rates, is that it is computationally fast and yields results that are relatively good when compared to experiment The disadvantage of LFA is that the bi-stable margin obtained is wider, for example, by about 40% in a helium filled panel as compared to experiment. The model can be used for parametric studies to observe the effects of variations in pressure, gap width, and percentage of xenon on the first on and first off voltages, bi-stable margin and on xenon metastable and dimer populations. We will present results of such parametric variations and comparisons with experiments.