Applications of Low-Temperature Plasmas

Abstract

Low-temperature plasmas are present in a broad field of technological applications and experimented an enormous growth after the end of the twentieth century. The most important examples of applications are lamps, pretreatment of polymer materials, packaging materials, treatment of surfaces, waste, air pollution mitigation, microelectronics, and flat panels display. Recently new applications in medicine, pharmacy, foods, biology, biomass and biofuel processing, attracted the interest of the industry and the scientific community.The purpose of this chapter is not to be exhaustive but illustrates some important industrial and technological applications. The fields where low-temperature plasmas are being employed today is vast, rapidly growing, and cannot be described in a single book chapter, so clearly well beyond this textbook. Of course, much will be left out, however a special emphasize will be stressed here in these new breakthrough applications of plasmas in health science, production of biofuels and agriculture. Plasmas for Materials ProcessingPlasma technologies are being used in industry due to their ability to offer a wide spectrum of possible treatments of materials. These plasmas are in fact source of heat and reactive species that have unique physical and chemical properties induced by charged particles. The main applications of these discharges are (Bonizzoni and Vassallo 2002): destruction of toxic/harmful materials, superficial modification of materials and creation of new materials.In industry basically two kind of plasmas are employed; the plasma torches which are thermal plasmas produced at high pressure by direct current, alternating electric fields like RF or microwaves. These plasmas have electron temperatures around

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