Microwave heating systems for atmospheric pressure: Nonequilibrium plasmas

Nonequilibrium plasma-chemical processing is attracting increasing interest because of the possibility of creating mixtures of active species that would not be available in thermal equilibrium. For significant throughput of reactants it would be advantageous to create nonequilibrium plasmas in large volumes of atmospheric-pressure mixtures of gases. Techniques for accomplishing this are very limited at present. Here they describe a novel microwave approach to creating nonequilibrium plasmas in large volumes of atmospheric-pressure gases using pulses of microwave radiation with very high peak power that are focused by quasi-optical techniques at one or more points in the interior of the reaction chamber. A new type of microwave source, the Plasma Electron Microwave Source (PEMS), is able to produce the require power levels by storing cw microwave power in a mirror-confined, relativistic-electron plasma and periodically transforming a fraction of that stored energy into intense microwave pulses. This approach avoids many of the limitations inherent in resonant cavity approaches and is expected to permit ultrahigh purity discharges to be produced