ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the more widely used plasma reactors according to their processing application. Films are two-dimensional continuous sheets of plastics, polymers, or other materials; webs are porous, two-dimensional sheets of fabric, either woven or non-woven; and fibers are monofilament 'strings' of a polymer, plastic, or natural material. Films, webs, and fibers are normally stored, shipped, and delivered to final production in the form of rolls, and it is these rolls that are normally processed by plasma reactors. Parallel-plate plasma sources are preferred to treat films and webs because of their two-dimensional nature. The economic and operational advantages of operating at 1 atm have led to the development of a variety of plasma-based surface treatment reactors that function in air and/or at 1 atm. Coronal currents in surface treatment reactors are small, from a few milliamperes to a few tens of milliamperes per meter of length, and the total rate of generation of active species is correspondingly small.
