Invited Paper SE-WeM5
Advanced Atmospheric Pressure Microplasma Sources for Surface Treatment

Wednesday, October 22, 2008, 9:20 am, Room 204

Compact miniaturized atmospheric plasmas exhibit very promising technological potential for surface treatment. Basically, there are two features which make them unique: (I) the tool-like, small size and light weight plasma generation unit allows fast and almost arbitrary 3D movements and (II) the contracted and comparably cold plasmas allow focused small-spot treatments, even of heat sensitive small size objects with temperature loads to the surface between 35°°C and 90°C. Especially in the area of biomedical applications these opportunities triggered significantly increasing research and development of plasma application directly to living objects. But also industrial surface treatment processes such as activation, functionalization, passivation, coating and etching gain importance. Here, an overview of different tailor-made miniaturized atmospheric pressure plasma sources is presented which can be used for specific purposes of surface coating, functionalization and decontamination. Actually, plasma assisted processes for biological decontamination up to the level of sterilization are becoming an alternative to conventional methods especially for heat sensitive materials. However, the realization of industrial plasma-based decontamination or sterilization technology still remains a great challenge. This is due to the fact that antimicrobial treatment processes needs to consider all properties of the product to be treated as well as the requirements of the complete procedure, e.g. a reprocessing of medical instruments. Here the applicability of plasma-based processes for the antimicrobial treatment on selected, heat sensitive products with special geometries is demonstrated. Modular and selective plasma sources, developed at INP are used which match the specific requirements of a variety of complex 3-dimensional structures. Measurements of relevant plasma properties (optical emission in the VIS, UV, and VUV region, along with substrate temperatures) are reported. Following this, a discourse is given about possible treatment processes and the state of the art in the new field of plasma medicine, i.e. about expected benefits of localized plasma treatment of living tissue for healing purposes. In the last part of the presentation the use of different RF-driven plasma atmospheric pressure microplasma-jets for deposition of dense SiO_x films with potential for barrier layers will be described. Measurements of relevant film properties (chemical composition and morphology) are reported and the state of the art of an advanced source tuning regime named “locked mode” is described. This mode leads to improvements of film quality and lateral homogeneity in the deposition spot.