A unique nitriding technique with the use of an atmospheric-pressure pulsed-arc plasma jet has been developed to offer a non-vacuum, easy-to-operate process of nitrogen doping to metal surfaces. This technique, however, suffered from a problem of excess nitrogen supply due to the high pressure results in undesirable formation of voids and iron nitrides in the treated metal surface. To overcome this problem, we have first established a method to control the nitrogen dose amount supplied to the steel surface in the relevant nitriding technique. When the hydrogen fraction in the operating gas of nitrogen/hydrogen gas mixture increased from 1% up to 5%, the nitrogen density of the treated steel surface drastically decreased. As a result, the formation of voids were suppressed successfully. The controllability of the nitrogen dose amount is likely attributable to the density of NH radicals existing in the plume of the pulsed-arc plasma jet.

Water purification by non-equilibrium atmospheric pressure plasma has attracted much attention and is expected to be a next-generation method. However, general approaches to improve the energy efficiency of the water purification have not been revealed. Therefore, to investigate important factors for increasing its energy efficiency, we developed coaxial cylindrical plasma reactors where pulsed streamers were generated between a high-voltage electrode and running water film. To evaluate the performance of the plasma reactors, we measured hydroxyl (OH) radicals in solution based on a chemical probe method using disodium terephthalic acid (NaTA) and decolorized indigo carmine solution. Our experimental results showed that the production rate of the OH radicals was approximately 20 nmol/s and that the energy efficiency of the decolorization was on the order of 10 g/kWh. In addition, we found that controlling liquid flow based on the Coandă effect and introducing the intermittent operation of the streamer discharges to use post-discharge reactions increased the energy efficiency by a factor of approximately 3.5, which indicated that these approaches are effective to improve the performance of the water purification by plasma.

A series of images of a generation process of an underwater secondary streamer from a developed primary streamer was visualized by an ultrahigh-speed camera with a microscope lens. The secondary streamer with a filamentary structure propagated with an average velocity of 30 km/s from one of the channel tips of the semispherical primary streamer with an average propagation velocity of 1.8 km/s. The synchronized current waveform showed that pulsed currents of about 100 mA were changed into a continuous current of about 300 mA when the secondary streamer started to propagate. This experiment was carried out by the application of a single-shot pulsed positive voltage to a needle-to-wire electrode system with a gap length of 6 mm.