New design improves water decontamination via plasma jet

Plasma is an ionized gas—that is, a gas containing electrons, ions, atoms, molecules, radicals, and photons. It is often called the fourth state of matter, and surprisingly, it permeates everything. Plasmas, which are artificially generated by transmitting energy to a gas, are found in the fluorescent tubes that light kitchens, but they have also allowed mobile phones to become smaller and smaller.

Plasma has been a veritable revolution in the world of technology. Before, to engrave the circuits on the silicon plates used in electronic devices like mobile phones, it was necessary to use polluting chemical products. Now, the use of plasma has made it possible to do this more cleanly and precisely, making it possible to make the slits smaller and smaller, and with them, the devices.

But plasma has other applications too, such as water treatment. The FQM-136 Physics of Plasmas and FQM-346 Organic Catalysis and Nanostructured Materials groups at the University of Córdoba have collaborated on a research study whose purpose was the elimination of contaminants present in water by applying plasma to promote chemical processes.

Their study is published in the journal Chemosphere.

With the aim of tackling the problem of the increasing presence of organic pollutants in waters, such as dyes and other compounds from agricultural and industrial activity in waters that destabilize ecosystems, these researchers opted for the application of plasma.

In 2017 they demonstrated, for the first time, that the argon plasmas induced by microwaves open to the air, when acting on water, generated in it reactive species containing oxygen and nitrogen (such as hydroxyl radicals, hydronous peroxide, nitrogen radicals) capable of…