Cold Atmospheric Pressure Plasma

Abstract

The incessantly increasing global population requires substantial resources for food production. Food production needs to increase by 50 to 70% in the next 30 years to avoid global food insecurity. The challenges of safely and securely feeding people become intensified in a world facing other problems such as shrinking arable land, less and more expensive fossil fuels, increasingly limited supplies of water, social unrest, economic uncertainty and within a scenario of a rapidly changing climate. Health hazards from food can be caused by infectious agents and toxic compounds. Plasma is generally known as the fourth state of matter, next to solids, liquids and gases. Plasma is an ionized gas containing atoms or molecules in a metastable state with a roughly zero net electrical charge. The application of plasma technology as a surface-cleaning tool has been commercially adopted for the removal of disinfection chemicals applied to medical devices manufactured from heat-sensitive plastics.