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Recently, plasma-assisted combustion has become a potentially applicable technology in many combustion scenarios. In this paper, a dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma generator is designed to explore the effect of plasma on the CH4 oxidation process, and several properties of combustion are considered. First, in the presence or absence of plasma discharge, physical appearance of the flame is examined and analyzed. Second, the flame propagation velocity is calculated by the flame front extracted from the imaging data with the Bunsen burner method. Finally, the main molecular components and their intensity variation in the flame and the plasma zones are identified with an emission spectrograph to analyze the effect of active species on the combustion process. We also discuss the possible kinetic regime of plasma-assisted combustion. Experimental results imply that plasma discharge applied to the premixed CH4/O2/He mixture significantly raises the flame speed with equivalence ratios ranging from 0.85 to 1.10, with the flame speed improved by 17% to 35%. It can be seen that plasma can improve methane oxidation efficiency in the premixed fuel/oxidizer, especially at a low equivalence ratio.

Surface charges greatly affect the discharge/flashover development process across an insulator. The relationship between surface charge distribution on insulating materials and measurement data based on Pockels technique is discussed, and an improved algorithm is built to calculate the real surface charge density from original data. In this algorithm, two-dimensional Fourier transform technique and Wiener filter are employed to reduce the amount of numerical calculation and improve the stability of computation. Moreover, this algorithm considers not only the influence of sample's thickness and permittivity, but also the impact of charges at different positions. The achievement of this calibration algorithm is demonstrated in details. Compared with traditional algorithms, the improved one supplies a better solution in the calibration of surface charge distribution on different samples with different thickness.