Plasma cleaning under low pressures based on the domestic microwave oven

Abstract

This article proposed a new solution to do the plasma cleaning under low pressure based on a domestic microwave oven. A conical bottle was placed in the oven according to the electric field distribution calculated by finite element method and Helmholtz equation. A vacuum pump was employed to make a low pressure environment in the bottle to generate plasma. Experiments demonstrated that discharges in the domestic microwave oven under low pressures from 100 Pa to 300 Pa can be easily triggered and maintained when the working gases were argon and air. The lower the pressure was, the easier to trigger and generate plasma, and the more uniform the plasma inside the conical bottle was. Experiments also found that this low-pressure Ar plasma generated in the domestic microwave oven can efficiently clean up the oils on the metallic sheets or glass substrates without damaging them.