NON-THERMAL PLASMA AT ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE AND ITS OPPORTUNITIES FOR APPLICATIONS

Abstract

The subject of this review is the low-temperature (or "cold") weakly-ionized but strongly non-equilibrium plasma created at atmospheric pressure in gaseous mixtures or directly in atmospheric air. Cold plasma is rather new, but very perspective object. The strong non-equilibrium of the weakly-ionized plasma leads to that energetic electrons despite their small quantity very effectively excite and dissociate the neutral particles which are contained in surrounding gas, for example, of a molecule of oxygen and water. The pointed above property of cold plasma is valuable from the practical point of view because it allows creating in plasma-forming gas rather intensive ultra-violet radiation and high concentration of physically and biochemically reactive species (metastable atoms and molecules, radicals, ozone, and others) with rather small specific energy consumption. Now the usage of cold plasma at atmospheric pressure gives the opportunity to solve many practical problems which were earlier seeming unsolvable. It is possible even to claim that the approaches based on the use of cold plasma in dense gases define modern progress in many fields of science, biomedicine and, in particular, in the field of chemical technology. The review of modern experimental methods of creation of the cold plasma at atmospheric pressure is given. Physical and chemical features of cold plasma in dense gases have been considered. Special attention is paid to the kinetics of the charged particles in non-equilibrium plasma and the vibrationally excited molecules as well. Additionally, the kinetics of the electronic excited and metastable states is taken into account because they also influence a biochemical activity of low-temperature plasma. A lot of places is given to concrete examples of the modern practical use of such plasma in ecology for the destruction of the low-concentrated harmful organic and inorganic impurities in the exhausted airflows at atmospheric pressure.