Microplasma Jets and Applications

Microplasma jets are an important kind of microplasma sources and involve a significant field of research with respect to lowtemperature plasma,which is not fully understood so far.Compared with traditional plasma jets,they consume less energy,and have lower temperature and with higher density of plasma.Moreover,most of microplasma jets can be operated at atmospheric pressure,because the gap between the electrodes is very small.Therefore,they are compact,economic,and portable in actual applications.Microplasma jets have attracted a great interest from scientists in the field of atmospheric pressure plasmas with wide studies world over.Several kinds of microplasma jets were proposed:DC microhollow discharging,high frequency micro dielectric barrier discharging,RF inductively coupled discharging,RF capacitively coupled discharging,microwave coupled discharging,to name just a few.Currently the focus is on how to achieve high density of atmospheric pressure plasma by using microwave and RF.And many types of microplasma jets were designed and used in several fields.In the semiconductor industry they are used for thin film deposition,local etching and photoresist stripping.Several types of microplasma jets have been used to sterilize and separate the cells in biomedical industry.In space industry,it is intended to be used to propel the micro space flight and micro satellites.We designed some types of the microplasma jets and measured their characteristics in the laboratory.With them,good results were obtained with respect to photoresist stripping and sterilization.Based on our study of the microplasma jets,this paper reviews the existing microplasma jets,discusses their mechanism and various fields of research and applications.