Surface cleaning and corrosion protection using plasma technology

Nowadays plasma techniques are getting more and more involved in production technologies because the traditional chemical treatments are sometimes less feasible and/or environmentally harmful. Besides the plasma pre-treatments, the plasma technology can also be utilized to develop thin protective layers. Day by day new techniques come into sight, so the categorization and review of them is an important task, which was the primary aim in this paper by trying to make an account on the most up-to-date ones. In this way, some important characteristic features and major advantages are presented here for the plasma treatment of plastic surfaces under ambient atmosphere, ultrafine surface cleaning with low-pressure plasma sources, and an example for the RF-PACVD deposition of protective and highly corrosion resistant thin glassy layers by plasma polymerization of HMDSO precursors. Envisaged future utilization of a small-scale atmospheric pressure plasma (APP) jet system installed in the Laboratory of Surface Techniques at University of Miskolc is also discussed.