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The need for efficient technologies to enhance productivity in agriculture strongly motivates research on plasma treatment of seeds and plants. In this study, the influence of plasma treatment on sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) seeds was evidenced throughout the entire life span of the plants. The seeds were packed in a DBD reactor operated in air and treated in plasma for 10 min, using a sinusoidal voltage of 16 kV amplitude at 50 Hz frequency. Early growth observation of plants under laboratory conditions showed that, after a slower start, the plasma-treated seeds developed faster and produced taller seedlings with greater total mass as compared to the control samples. Results obtained from mature plants cultivated in the field revealed a positive effect of plasma exposure with respect to capitulum size, number of seeds per capitulum and mass per thousand seeds, resulting in a remarkable increase in crop yield. The plasma effect lasted for at least two weeks of seed storage; however, it was considerably affected by the sowing period.

A dielectric barrier discharge with falling liquid film was used to degrade the antibiotics amoxicillin and sulfamethoxazole in water. The antibiotic concentrations decrease exponentially during plasma treatment and have similar half‐life time, in the range 4–9 min. By increasing the discharge power (9.1–20.2 W), faster removal of the contaminants is obtained, but the energy efficiency remains almost the same, 3–4 g/kWh at 50%. Oxygen considerably improves the energy yield by a factor of two as compared with air, due to more effective formation of reactive oxygen species. It was found that the degradation of antibiotics in mixture essentially depends on the overall initial concentration, this behavior being attributed to the similar reactivity of the two investigated compounds.