Atmospheric pressure weakly ionized plasma for materials processing
[Thesis]
Md. Rokibul Islam
Pedrow, Patrick D.
Washington State University
2016
134
Committee members: Englund, Karl R.; Garcia-Perez, Manuel; Schneider, John B.
Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-339-95165-2
Ph.D.
Electrical Engineering
Washington State University
2016
The use of atmospheric pressure non-thermal plasmas in diverse applications has resulted in development of a wide variety of plasma sources. While corona discharges have been studied for more than a century to understand the fundamentals of electrical gas discharges, the use of the corona discharge in materials processing has been often very limited. In this work, we investigated an atmospheric pressure weakly ionized plasma source based on the corona discharge; and utilized the developed plasma source for materials processing. The plasma was generated with a distinctive pointto- point electrode geometry that achieved enhanced plasma generation including back corona. We investigated early growth of plasma polymerized acetylene deposition and demonstrated that this deposited material could modify the surface properties of natural fibers with a reasonable processing time. We showed the viability of the developed plasma source to generate etching plasmas that included admixtures of dry air and oxygen. This work demonstrated the potential for corona based plasma sources to provide cost-effective and scalable operation compared to other commercially available atmospheric pressure plasma sources.