Vapor Plasma Membrane Treatment

Plasma processes (Yasuda 1985; d’Agostino 1990; Biederman and Osada 1992; Inagaki 1996) were initially developed for microelectronics in the 1950s. They represent a clean (producing few or not effluents) and also extremely flexible technology whose basic equipment, well adapted to automation, makes it possible to achieve goals as various as singular in terms of specific properties of use; their costs of operation are moreover relatively weak. Based on these advantages, they are used today in many fields of the materials chemistry (in particular the membranes field) even if their industrialization still remains not very developed, because of the high cost of the equipment necessary to their implementation and of a certain conservatism of the industrialists reticent to introduce this new technology, however so promising.

Defined by Crookes in 1879 as the fourth state of the matter, a plasma is a partially ionized and overall neutral medium generated by the application of an electric...