Development of plasma needle to be used for biomedical applications

Plasma needle is a novel design of a plasma source at atmospheric pressure to achieve a non-thermal plasma jet. The advantage of the plasma needle is that it can be operated in open air, outside a vessel. The plasma that is generated with the plasma needle is small (about one millimetre) and non-thermal, the temperature of the neutral particles and ions is in about room temperature and suitably can interact with living biological cell without damaging the cell. In this work, we report the development of a plasma needle, which is operated by a dc power source and produced a stable plasma jet on water surface. Argon gas is used to operate the plasma needle. The preliminary electrical diagnostics of the plasma needle shows that the discharge is filamentary in nature. For diagnostic of the plasma jet produced by the developed plasma needle, the produced plasma jet is directed to water surface and characterization are carried out by means of electrical discharge characteristics and optical emission spectroscopy. In this work, preliminary results of the diagnostic will be presented.