Atmospheric-pressure pulsed dielectric barrier discharges have been widely applied

and its mechanisms and discharge characteristics are the topic of long（DBD）in argon gas at atmospheric pressure under long pulsewidths have been investigated numerically

so as to present the theoretical estimation for the characteristics of this discharge. A 1-D fluid model with an incorporation of the strict boundary conditions has been built for the present investigation. Using the built model

the discharge cur-rents calculated under different pulsewidths are in good agreement with the experiments. The discharge current den-sities and spatial distributions of the particle densities and electric field at long pulsewidths and at the correspond-ing short pulsewidths have been calculated and compared

the reaction pathways for the generation of argon parti-cles are presented

and the corresponding contributions have also been calculated. The present simulations show that in these two cases

i.e. long pulsewidths and the corresponding short pulsewidths

the calculated results are in exchange symmetry and the discharges are in the atmospheric-pressure glow discharge mode. In addition

the effects of pulsewidth on the reaction pathway contributions are very small.