Introduction
Gas plasma technology is able to remove residue after manufacturing, any foreign materials and Bio-burden from the surface. It can be used for cleaning effectively, eco-friendly way and without using hazardous solvents. Ionised gas, on absorbing energy from the RF / Microwave field, vibrate faster- and “scrub” the surface. Through the process of etching or coating of the selective area, surface smoothening in micro-scale is possible through gas plasma technology.
The possible applications could be for Cleaning Catheters, Sterilisation, Biochemical assays, Implants, Decontaminations, Contact Lens, Hearing Aids, Cell culturing and Microfluidics like applications.
In Cell culturing, normal cell are transformed into cancer cells by way of radiation, chemical or virus to study closely the behavior of the modified cell and possible new treatments. Another application can be cell sorting by strength of adhesion.
In biomedical applications, it is useful in order to make synthetic biomaterials compatible to natural tissues. Surface modification through plasma cleaning can minimize adverse reactions such as infection, inflammation or thrombosis formation while using bio-materials.
Plasma is normally created under a low-pressure environment using selected gas or air depending on the application. In cleaning application, Low frequency plasma (40-50 kHz) is preferred over Higher frequency Plasma (13.56 MHz or 2.54 GHz). This is to achieve Higher Density, Increased Efficiency and Better Uniformity.
Plasma cleaning is used to make microfluidic devices such as polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) for permanent bonding with glass slides to create water-tight micro-channels which are used for blood plasma separation, electro osmotic flow valves, RNA sequencing etc.
Temperature monitoring of the device under preparation, using RF to create Plasma, can be done accurately using Fiber optics temperature sensor of Rugged Monitoring, since it is immune to EMI, accurate and ultrathin which can be used close to the PDMS device under preparation.