Determination of Surface Temperature in ICP RF Plasma Treatments of Organic Materials

Abstract

The reactions that can occur on organic materials treated in plasma enviorement are strongly affected by surface temperature, thus the sharp determination of this variable is extremely important to process control. In situ temperature measurements are often employed; however, the measured point is generally under the treated surface. If in metallic materials the high thermal conductivity minimizes this problem, in non-metallic materials processing it becomes important, because its thermal resistivity besides a high sensibility to small temperature variations. The present work uses a simulation tool to extract thermal data on Ar+O 2 RF plasma processing of Stearic Acid. Experimental data were obtained by thermocouples placed inside the samples. The extrapolation of surface temperature was performed by numerical simulation with Autodesk CFD software v.15.1. Results show that the temperature of the surface reaches values higher than the ones measured inside the sample holder. This difference of temperature is in good agreement with the visual observation of the phase transformations in the treated material, showing a simple and valuable tool to better control of plasma treatments.

Influence of applied plasma power on degradation of L-proline in an inductively coupled RF plasma reactor

“…The higher degradation of the samples with the increase of the power is related to the greater density of the species chemically active in the plasma, ions and electrons. The temperature of the sample is another factor that should contribute significantly to a greater degradation with power increase [2,5,21,22,37]. Because of that, in the present work, a water circulation system was used to keep the temperature constant at about 0°C.…”

“…However, due to the complexity of the plasma environment, it is necessary to obtain more information about the influence of the different species on the degradation of organic functions [19]. In addition, it is also important to study the structural changes of the treated material generated by the physical parameters of the discharge, both in organic [20][21][22] and in metallic materials [23].…”

Influence of the pressure on the interaction between stearic acid and Ar-O2 in inductively coupled radio frequency plasma

“…Molecules widely used as models for surface contaminants are stearic acid and hexatriacontane. Works carried out with these compounds [12][13][14][17][18][19][20][21][22] evaluated the influence of the types of discharge and process parameters such as gas composition, pressure, power, and frequency of the electrical source.…”