Effects of metastable species in helium and argon atmospheric pressure plasma jets (APPJs) on inactivation of periodontopathogenic bacteria

Abstract

The helium and argon have been widely used as discharge gases in atmospheric pressure plasma jets (APPJs) for bacteria inactivation. The APPJs show apparent different in bullet propagation speed and bacteria inactivation rate apparently vary with discharge gas species. This work shows that these two distinctive features of APPJs can be linked through one factor, the metastable energy level. The effects of helium and argon metastable species on APPJ discharge mechanism for reactive oxygen nitrogen species (RONS) generation in APPJs are investigated by experiments and numerical estimation. The discharge mechanism is investigated by using the bullet velocity from the electric field which is obtained with laser induced fluorescence (LIF) measurement. The measured electric field also applied on the estimation of RONS generation, as electron energy source term in numerical particle reaction. The estimated RONS number is verified by comparing NO and OH densities to the inactivation rate of periodontitis bacteria. The characteristic time for bacteria inactivation of the helium-APPJ was found to be 1.63 min., which is significantly less than that of the argon-APPJ, 12.1 min. In argon-APPJ, the argon metastable preserve the energy due to the lack of the Penning ionization. Thus the surface temperature increase is significantly higher than helium-APPJ case. It implies that the metastable energy plays important role in both of APPJ bullet propagation and bacteria inactivation mechanism.