In recent years, cold atmospheric pressure plasma (CAPP) technology has received substantial attention due to its valuable properties including operational simplicity, low running cost, and environmental friendliness. Several different gases (air, nitrogen, helium, argon) and techniques (corona discharge, dielectric barrier discharge, plasma jet) can be used to generate plasma at atmospheric pressure and low temperature. Plasma treatment is routinely used in materials science to modify the surface properties (e.g., wettability, chemical composition, adhesion) of a wide range of materials (e.g., polymers, textiles, metals, glasses). Moreover, CAPP seems to be a powerful tool for the inactivation of various pathogens (e.g., bacteria, fungi, viruses) in the food industry (e.g., food and packing material decontamination, shelf life extension), agriculture (e.g., disinfection of seeds, fertilizer, water, soil) and medicine (e.g., sterilization of medical equipment, implants). Plasma medicine also holds great promise for direct therapeutic treatments in dentistry (tooth bleaching), dermatology (atopic eczema, wound healing) and oncology (melanoma, glioblastoma). Overall, CAPP technology is an innovative, powerful and effective tool offering a broad application potential. However, its limitations and negative impacts need to be determined in order to receive regulatory approval and consumer acceptance.

Poor adhesion of synthetic macro fibers to a cementitious matrix limits their reinforcing capacity when used in fiber-reinforced cementitious composites (FRCCs). As a remedy to this problem, high concentrations of fibers must be incorporated into such mixtures, which makes their dispersion in fresh mixtures difficult to achieve. Several strategies have been adopted to improve bonding between synthetic fibers and a cementitious matrix, but most of them cause deterioration of fiber properties. In previous studies, plasma treatment of polymer fibers and strengthening of the fiber-matrix interface using recycled concrete powder (RCP) increased pull-out resistance at a scale of a single fiber. Here, it was found that these results cannot be easily scaled, and the tension-softening behavior of FRCCs can be influenced negatively, despite positive pull-out test results, due to random orientation of fibers. Treating fibers with plasma appears reasonable at any scale, but RCP matrix modification must be carefully performed. Nevertheless, RCP may contribute to more sustainable concrete mixtures and considering its use when designing FRCC elements is recommended.

Asphalt mixtures often fail due to a low adhesion of bituminous binder to mineral aggregate, which leads to surface coarse damages like potholes and fatigue cracking. To avoid this phenomenon, different types of adhesion promoters may be admixed into bituminous binder but a new question about their effectiveness arises. This paper presents two semi-automatic methods, which reliably replace the subjective assessment. Both of them use a digital image of asphalt mixtures as an input. The first is based on a gray level thresholding, while the second one on an entropy-based image segmentation. Asphalt mixtures composed from Zbraslav aggregate (fraction 8–16 mm), paving grade bitumen 50/70 and several types of adhesion promoters were made and subjected to the adhesion assessment. It was shown that aggregate grains coated by binder was equal to ca. 83–88% in the case of reference binder, while that was increased by ca. 10–13% if whatever adhesion promoters were used.

This article deals with utilization of recycled concrete in form of high-speed milled powder into cement based materials. Recycled concrete powder in that form is used as microfiller and cement replacement. This article contains results of mechanical properties of the cement pastes with different amount of recycled concrete powder. The mechanical properties as the compressive strength, flexural strength, dynamic Young's and share moduli are observed during 409 days. According to results can be assumed that recycled concrete powder can be used as microfiller and cement replacement under 30 wt. % of total amount. Especially the results of compressive strength are comparable with reference sample. But there are some abnormalities in long term development of the strength that need to be explained.