Plasma‐activated water: Physicochemical properties, microbial inactivation mechanisms, factors influencing antimicrobial effectiveness, and applications in the food industry

Abstract

Novel nonthermal inactivation technologies have been increasingly popular over the traditional thermal food processing methods due to their capacity in maintaining microbial safety and other quality parameters. Plasma-activated water (PAW) is a cutting-edge technology developed around a decade ago, and it has attracted considerable attention as a potential washing disinfectant. This review aims to offer an overview of the fundamentals and potential applications of PAW in the agri-food sector. A detailed description of the interactions between plasma and water can help to have a better understanding of PAW, hence the physicochemical properties of PAW are discussed. Further, this review elucidates the complex inactivation mechanisms of PAW, including oxidative stress and physical effect. In particular, the influencing factors on inactivation efficacy of PAW, including processing factors, characteristics of microorganisms, and background environment of water are extensively described. Finally, the potential applications of PAW in the food industry, such as surface decontamination for various food products, including fruits and vegetables, meat and seafood, and also the treatment on quality parameters are presented. Apart from decontamination, the applications of PAW for seed germination and plant growth, as well as meat curing are also summarized. In the end, the challenges and limitations of PAW for scale-up implementation, and future research efforts are also discussed. This review demonstrates that PAW has the potential to be successfully used in the food industry.

Helium Atmospheric Pressure Plasma Jet Source Treatment of White Grapes Juice for Winemaking

“…Our plasma source mean electrical power, around 8 W, was close to the values reported by Guo, Lukic, Nishime, Pankaj and Sarangapani (2-20 W) [26,36,[92][93][94], but lower than 20-50 W as reported by Starek, Mujahid, Wang [38,95,96], or less than 50-200 W as reported by Bao, Pan, Zhao, Xiang, Laurita, Sainz-Garcia [29,40,41,43,97,98], and even far less than 300-750 W as reported by Ashtiani, Huang, Fan, Jambrak, Zhou [30,42,44,99,100]. The higher the dissipated plasma power got, the higher the possibility of thermal treatment of the sample was.…”

“…Most of them pointed out the need to assess the barrel aging on the wine product, slowing down the fermentation process and even stopping it and green technologies for wine treatment for long term storage. Among these, plasma technologies based on gas discharges, at atmospheric pressure, are on the way to replacing old and expensive methods for fruit juice, wine and yeast treatment, the goal being the long-term storage, aging and even decontamination of such products, and seems to meet most of the criteria required by the winemakers [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44]. Depending on the utilization, the plasma source needs be tuned as to comply with the application requirements (power, electric field, reactive species).…”

Inactivation of Schistosoma Using Low-Temperature Plasma

“…NTP is widely used in many areas of human activity including modification of surface of various materials including nanoporous membranes, in food industry, biotechnology or wastewater treatment. Its applications in biology and medicine summarized numerous reviews [21][22][23][24] or the comprehensive book of [25]. Medical applications include mainly disinfection processes, but also acceleration of the blood coagulation and improved wound healing, dental applications or cancer therapy [26,27].…”

Influence of Non-Thermal Atmospheric Pressure Plasma Jet on Extracellular Activity of α-Amylase in Aspergillus oryzae

“…Since RONS are known to produce deactivating and activating effects, depending on their concentration, plasma treatment can also possibly generate these dual effects based on the treatment dose. The application of NTAPP to microorganisms has been mostly focused on the deactivation of microbes harmful to human life [10][11][12]. In food industries, NTAPP has proven to be extremely useful for food preservation by mediating the deactivation of microorganisms, including pathogens, spoilage fungi, and bacterial spores [13].…”