Abstract
We are developing an electrostatic neutralizer operating in an atmosphere without oxygen for the organic electronics fabrication industry. As a part of the study, we investigated ion generation and neutralization characteristics of an ac-corona-discharge-type ionizer in different atmospheric gases such as ambient air, pure nitrogen, mixed N2-O2 and N2-SF6 gases, with changing the partial pressure of O2 and SF6, respectively. The I-V characteristic of the emitter shows that the negative current in nitrogen gas is significantly greater than the positive one; thus the product final voltage VPF gives a significant deviation to a negative value (about -2 kV). However, by introducing SF6 gas by 0.01 %, VPF reduces to about 0 V as that in ambient air. The amount of SF6 needed to improve the ion balance is three orders of magnitude smaller than that of O2, due to higher electronic affinity that a SF6 molecule has.
