  An experimental investigation comparing the properties of plasma jets in
dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) configurations using a powered electrode
with and without a dielectric barrier, while keeping a second dielectric
barrier over the grounded electrode, is reported in this work. For this
purpose, two different power sources were used to produce the plasma jets, with
one of them producing a pulsed high-voltage (HV) output and the other one
producing a pulse-like HV output, which consists of a damped sine HV waveform.
Measurements of plasma parameters were performed for both configurations using
argon and helium as working gases. As a result, if the pulsed power source is
used, significant differences were found in discharge power ($P_{plasma}$),
rotational and vibrational temperatures ($T_r$ and $T_v$, respectively) when
switching from one configuration to the other. On the other hand, using the
pulse-like HV only the $P_{plasma}$ parameter presented significant differences
when switching the electrode's configuration. For the pulsed source it has been
observed that despite the remarkable increase in $P_{plasma}$ when changing
from the double barrier configuration to the single barrier one, the values
obtained for $T_r$ and $T_v$ also increased, but not in the same proportion as
the increase in $P_{plasma}$, which suggests a non-linear dependency between
temperatures and discharge power in the plasma jet. As an example for
application of plasmas in both configurations, tests in an attempt to remove
copper films deposited on alumina substrates were performed and, as a result,
there was significant material removal only when the powered electrode was in
contact with the plasma. As a general conclusion, if higher power is really
required for some application it is better to use this configuration.
