Design & experiments on pen-shaped plasma torch for surface modification

Abstract

The paper presents design and experiments on pen-shaped plasma torch that generates non-thermal plasma for various surface modification applications. Plasma is used for a variety of industrial applications like surface modifications, surface activation, and surface treatment for coating technology. The hydrophilic property of plastic strip and polyethylene is enhanced by surface treatment done by the plasma torch. The device construction is simple and effective. The present available device is still not feasible for practical applications for its limited effective surface treating area. In this context, the new design of the “pen-shaped plasma torch” performs efficiently in treating area due to swirl motion. To validate this experiments are carried out with designed pen-shaped plasma torch at constant pressure investigating the behavior of the generated plasma for various application of surface modification. The result shows that the stable plasma is achieved at a gas flow rate in the range of 16–18 L min−1 along with the electrode gap in the range of 1.0–1.2 mm. After plasma treatment, the writing ability on plastic film, cleaning on steel plunger and etching ability on the copper strip was improved. The setup established provides fundamental information on plasma generation and practical aspect of surface modification characterization.