Atmospheric pressure plasmas have been ground-breaking for plasma science and technologies, due to their significant application potential in many fields, including medicinal, biological, and environmental applications. This is predominantly due to their efficient production and delivery of chemically reactive species under ambient conditions. One of the challenges in progressing the field is comparing plasma sources and results across the community and the literature. To address this a reference plasma source was established during the ‘biomedical applications of atmospheric pressure plasmas’ EU COST Action MP1101. It is crucial that reference sources are reproducible. Here, we present the reproducibility and variance across multiple sources through examining various characteristics, including: absolute atomic oxygen densities, absolute ozone densities, electrical characteristics, optical emission spectroscopy, temperature measurements, and bactericidal activity. The measurements demonstrate that the tested COST jets are mainly reproducible within the intrinsic uncertainty of each measurement technique.

Cold atmospheric pressure plasma jets (CAPJs) are an emerging technology for the localised treatment of heat sensitive surfaces. Adding humidity to the CAPJ's feed gas yields an effective production of highly reactive intermediate species, such as hydrogen atoms, oxygen atoms, and hydroxyl radicals, among others, which are key species for biomedical applications. This study focusses on the effluent of the CAPJ kINPen, which was operated with argon feed gas and a humidity admixture of 3000 ppm, while a gas curtain was used to limit the diffusion of ambient air into the effluent. The axial and radial density distribution of O and H atoms is measured by means of picosecond two-photon absorption laser induced fluorescence spectroscopy (ps-TALIF). A maximum O atom density of (3.8 ± 0.7) • 10 15 cm −3 and a maximum H atom density of (3.5 ± 0.7) • 10 15 cm −3 are found at the nozzle of the plasma jet.The experimental results are compared to a two-dimensional reacting flow model that is coupled with a local zero-dimensional plasma chemical model. With this model, the main H and O atom production mechanisms are determined to be the dissociation

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Photoplethysmography (PPG) is a non-invasive, inexpensive and unobtrusive method to achieve heart rate monitoring during physical exercises. Motion artifacts during exercise challenge the heart rate estimation from wrist-type PPG signals. This paper presents a methodology to overcome these limitation by incorporating acceleration information. The proposed algorithm consisted of four stages: (1) A wavelet based denoising, (2) an acceleration based denoising, (3) a frequency based approach to estimate the heart rate followed by (4) a postprocessing step. Experiments with different movement types such as running and rehabilitation exercises were used for algorithm design and development. Evaluation of our heart rate estimation showed that a mean absolute error 1.96 bpm (beats per minute) with standard deviation of 2.86 bpm and a correlation of 0.98 was achieved with our method. These findings suggest that the proposed methodology is robust to motion artifacts and is therefore applicable for heart rate monitoring during sports and rehabilitation.

In this paper, we present different types of integrators for electromagnetic particle-in-cell (PIC) methods. While the integrator is an important tool of the PIC methods, it is necessary to characterize the different conservation approaches of the integrators, e.g. symplecticity, energy-or charge-conservation. We discuss the different principles, e.g. composition, filtering, explicit and implicit ideas.While, particle in cell methods are well-studied, the combination between the different parts, i.e. pusher, solver and approximations are hardly to analyze. we concentrate on choosing the optimal pusher component, with respect to conservation and convergence behavior.We discuss oscillations of the pusher component, strong external magnetic fields and optimal conservation of energy and momentum.The algorithmic ideas are discussed and numerical experiments compare the exactness of the different schemes.An outlook to overcome the different error components is discussed in the future works.