Spatially extended atmospheric plasma arrays

Abstract

This paper reports a systematic study of spatially extended atmospheric plasma (SEAP) arrays employing many parallel plasma jets packed densely and arranged in an honeycomb configuration. The work is motivated by the challenge of using inherently small atmospheric plasmas to address many large-scale processing applications including plasma medicine. The first part of the study considers a capillary–ring electrode configuration as the elemental jet with which to construct a 2D SEAP array. It is shown that its plasma dynamics is characterized by strong interaction between two plasmas initially generated near the two electrodes. Its plume length increases considerably when the plasma evolves into a high-current continuous mode from the usual bullet mode. Its electron density is estimated to be at the order of 3.7 × 1012 cm−3. The second part of the study considers 2D SEAP arrays constructed from parallelization of identical capillary–ring plasma jets with very high jet density of 0.47–0.6. Strong jet–jet interactions of a 7-jet 2D array are found to depend on the excitation frequency, and are effectively mitigated with the jet-array structure that acts as an effective ballast. The impact range of the reaction chemistry of the array exceeds considerably the cross-sectional dimension of the array itself, and the physical reach of reactive species generated by any single jet exceeds significantly the jet–jet distance. As a result, the jet array can treat a large sample surface without relative sample–array movement. A 37-channel SEAP array is used to indicate the scalability with an impact range of up to 48.6 mm in diameter, a step change in capability from previously reported SEAP arrays. 2D SEAP arrays represent one of few current options as large-scale low-temperature atmospheric plasma technologies with distinct capability of directed delivery of reactive species and effective control of the jet–jet and jet–sample interactions.