Reactive fluxes delivered by dielectric barrier discharge filaments to slightly wounded skin

Abstract

The application of atmospheric-pressure plasmas to human tissue has been shown to have therapeutic effects for wound healing and in treatment of skin diseases. In this paper, we report on a computational study of the intersection of plasma filaments in a dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) with a small wound in human skin in the context of plasma medicine. The wound is represented as a small cut in the epidermal layer of cells. Intracellular structures and their electrical properties were incorporated into the two-dimensional computational mesh in order to self-consistently couple gas phase plasma transport with the charging of the surface of the wound. We quantify the fluxes of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species, ions and photons produced in or diffusing into the wound as might occur during the first few discharge pulses of treatment. Comparison is made to fluxes predicted by global modelling. We show that the relative location of the plasma filament with respect to the wound is important on plasma time scales (ns) for ions and photons, and for radicals directly produced by electron impact processes. On the longer-term diffusion time scales (ms) the position of the plasma filament relative to the wound is not so critical. For typical DBD conditions, the magnitude of these fluxes to the cellular surfaces corresponds to fluences of radicals nearly equal to the surface site density. These results imply that the biological reactivity is limited by reaction probabilities and not the availability of radical fluxes.