Abstract
The interaction of plasmas and liquid aerosols offers special advantages and opens new perspectives for plasma–liquid applications. The paper focuses on the key research challenges and potential of plasma-aerosol interaction at atmospheric pressure in several fields, outlining opportunities and benefits in terms of process tuning and throughputs. After a short overview of the recent achievements in plasma–liquid field, the possible application benefits from aerosol injection in combination with plasma discharge are listed and discussed. Since the nature of the chemicophysical plasma-droplet interactions is still unclear, a multidisciplinary approach is recommended to overcome the current lack of knowledge and to open the plasma communities to scientists from other fields, already active in biphasic systems diagnostic. In this perspective, a better understanding of the high chemical reactivity of gas–liquid reactions will bring new opportunities for plasma assisted in-situ and on-demand reactive species production and material processing.
Highlights
Featured Application: Plasma-aerosol systems open new potential opportunities in a wide range of applications including agriculture, combustion control, nanotechnology, medicine and cosmetics
The combination of extensive efforts devoted to both plasma action on animal cells and the chemical analysis of plasma-treated solutions, together with the development of dedicated plasma sources for such applications, were between the key reasons why new emerging fields have been recently introduced, such as plasma agriculture, plasma catalysis, plasma nanomaterial synthesis/functionalization, plasma cancer, and plasma for skin treatment and cosmetics [9,10,11,12,13,14,15]
While direct contact with a flowing liquid film has been proposed as an alternative to increase the plasma–liquid interface [17,18], some recent works have proposed the use of plasma-droplet interactions with the aim of overcoming the limit of batch process enabling in in-situ and on-demand dispensing [19,20,21]
Summary
Plasmas in/above/with liquids [1] science and technology at atmospheric pressure have been reawakened these last few years, partly due to the very active research activity in the field of plasma medicine and the requirement to account for liquid layers covering in vitro cell culture or organs during in vivo or clinical studies. The combination of extensive efforts devoted to both plasma action on animal cells and the chemical analysis of plasma-treated solutions, together with the development of dedicated plasma sources for such applications, were between the key reasons why new emerging fields have been recently introduced, such as plasma agriculture, plasma catalysis, plasma nanomaterial synthesis/functionalization, plasma cancer, and plasma for skin treatment and cosmetics [9,10,11,12,13,14,15] In this framework, many scientific works and reviews [1,16] provided insights into the non-equilibrium chemistry created at the plasma–liquid interface and addressed the role of liquid and gas reaction pathways. The large number of reaction pathways and available plasma parameters, already challenging for batch processes, bring even more complexity to the analysis and investigation of plasma–liquid interaction but open new possibilities for technological applications
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