e-CAP: Engineering Cold Atmospheric Plasmas

等离子体被称为物质的第四种状态，其他三种状态分别是固体、液体和气体。虽然这听起来很奇怪，但实际上它们正变得越来越普遍。等离子体存在于平板电视和荧光管中，它们也被用于制造计算机芯片。等离子体是由携带电荷的原子和分子组成的。因此，它们处于一种高度不稳定的状态，这意味着它们迫切地想要做出反应。这为许多实际应用提供了巨大的可能性。今天，等离子体开始被用于改变活细胞、聚合物甚至人类皮肤！为了使等离子体发挥作用，它们需要接近室温，这样的等离子体被称为冷等离子体。大多数冷等离子体是在真空条件下产生的，真空等离子体既昂贵又不方便。现在有一种方法可以在露天制造冷等离子体。这些新型等离子体通常被称为冷大气等离子体或CAP。它们比真空等离子体更便宜，更容易使用，并将彻底改变工业和医学的许多应用。控制低温大气等离子体具有挑战性；如果你想让它们稳定它们往往不是很活泼当它们变得活泼时比如通过引入氧它们往往不稳定！重要的是，应用程序的效率依赖于它们的反应性，而应用程序过程的可控性依赖于它们的稳定性。因此，开发具有足够反应性和稳定性的冷大气等离子体是非常重要的，这被称为冷大气等离子体的稳定性-反应性挑战。我们想解决射频冷大气等离子体的稳定性-反应性挑战。这将引导我们走向理解低温大气等离子体的核心。作为工程师，我们相信，如果我们能更好地了解等离子体，它们将在未来有更多的用途。我们提出了一个雄心勃勃的策略，包括在几个不同的科学学科的技术。通过整合等离子体物理学、生物学和反应化学，我们将能够利用CAP科学的知识宝库，从而第一次对稳定性-反应性关系有一个连贯的理解。这是由一种新的基于生物学的方法来表征等离子体的反应性，并通过复杂的数学建模工具来揭示等离子体的稳定性机制。此外，我们的目标是通过工程创新从根本上改善稳定性-反应性关系，以操纵等离子体生产的动力学。这将通过使用脉冲和高射频电压的新型等离子体激励方案来实现，而不是通常的名义上为13.56MHz的正弦电压。我们满怀信心地期望，拟议的工作将在CAP科学及其技术能力方面取得重大进展。这项工作将有助于实现广泛的应用。在这里不可能列出冷大气等离子体可能具有的所有用途，但我们特别兴奋的是食品净化。也许你还记得2004年10月左右的食品恐慌，当时快餐店出售的汉堡中使用了生菜酱。生菜被一种叫做沙门氏菌的危险细菌污染。众所周知，沙拉很难做到安全。你不能用热，这是我们对付虫子的常用方法。谁会想要吃一个看起来软绵绵的沙拉，因为它的温度只是上升了一小会儿？我们想用孢子做的工作将教会我们如何使等离子体对细菌更致命，这可能会导致更有效的方法使生菜和其他新鲜食品安全。

Plasmas have been called the fourth state of matter - the other three being solids, liquids and gases. Although this may sound exotic they are actually becoming increasingly common. Plasmas are found in flat screen TV and fluorescence tubes, and they are also used in industry to make computer chips. Plasmas are made up of atoms and molecules that carry electric charges. As a result, they are in a highly unstable state and that means that they desperately want to react with something. This offers huge possibilities for numerous practical uses. Today plasmas are beginning to be used to change livings cells, polymers and even human skin! For plasmas to be useful, they need to be close to room temperature and such plasmas are referred to as cold plasmas . Most cold plasmas are generated under vacuum, and vacuum plasmas are both expensive and inconvenient. There is now a way of making cold plasmas in the open air. These new plasmas are often known as cold atmospheric plasmas or CAP. They are cheaper and easier to use than vacuum plasmas, and are set to revolutionise many applications in both industry and medicine. Controlling cold atmospheric plasmas is challenging; if you want to make them stable they tend not to be very reactive and when they are made reactive - by introducing oxygen into them for example - they tend not to be stable! Significantly the efficiency of their applications relies on how reactive they are, and the controllability of their application processes relies on how stable they are. Therefore it is important to develop cold atmospheric plasmas that are sufficiently reactive AND stable, and this is referred to as the stability-reactivity challenge of cold atmospheric plasmas. We want to address the stability-reactivity challenge for radiofrequency cold atmospheric plasmas. This will lead us towards getting to the heart of understanding cold atmospheric plasmas. As engineers, we believe that if we can better understand plasmas they will be put to many more uses in the future. We propose an ambitious strategy that embraces techniques in several different disciplines of science. By integrating plasma physics, biology and reaction chemistry, we will be able to harness knowledge-pockets of CAP science so as to enable, for the first time, a coherent understanding of the stability-reactivity relationship. This is supported by a novel biology-based approach to characterise plasma reactivity and by sophisticated mathematical modelling tools to unravel plasma stability mechanisms. Furthermore, we aim to fundamentally improve the stability-reactivity relationship through engineering innovation to manipulate the dynamics of plasma production. This will be achieved through novel plasma excitation schemes using pulsed and high radiofrequency voltage rather than the usual sinusoidal voltage nominally at 13.56MHz. The proposed work is confidently expected to produce a major advance in both CAP science and its technological capabilities. This work should help achieve an immense range of applications. It is not possible to list here all the possible uses that cold atmospheric plasmas may have, but one that we are particularly excited about is food decontamination. Perhaps you remember the food scare around October 2004 that centred round the use of lettuce dressing in hamburgers sold in fast food restaurants. The lettuce was contaminated with dangerous bacteria called Salmonella. Salads are notoriously difficult to make safe. You cannot use heat, which is the normal way we have of dealing with bugs. Who would want to eat a limp looking excuse for a salad that had its temperature increased even for a short while? The work we want to do with spores will teach us how to make plasmas more deadly to bugs and that could lead to more efficient ways of making lettuce and other fresh foods safe.