Absolute Measurements of Nitric Oxide Production Rate in Atmospheric Plasma Jet

Summary form given only. Atmospheric plasma jets (APPJ) are attractive plasma sources for biomedical applications due to opportunity of local treatment of complicated surfaces without thermal damage of treated materials. Nitric oxide (NO) is one of the chemically active molecules, which are interesting for biomedical applications and generated by APPJ. NO molecules are easily detected by optical emission spectroscopy, but it gives information only about density of excited molecules. In work Stoffels et al. (2006) a relative production of NO molecules in the ground state has been measured by means of mass spectrometry. In present work the tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy (TOLAS) has been used to measure the absolute production rate of NO molecule in APPJ. A RF (13.6 MHz) plasma generated on the tip a of needle electrode in Ar flow (5-10 slm) with a small Air admixture (up to 1%) has been investigated. The APPJ was mounted in a Herriott multi pass cell, which was aligned for 100 m absorption length. Main results can be formulated as following: the NO production (a) does not depend on Ar flow (b) has a maximum at 0.2% of air admixture (c) shows linear growth with a power between 4 and 16 W and (d) is in the range of (0.1-70)ldr10^-3 seem depending on experimental conditions.