Functional Modification of Materials and Synthesis of Nanostructures by Non-Equilibrium Atmospheric Pressure Plasma Processes

Widely employed for a steadily increasing number of industrial processes and experimental studies, plasma can be considered as one of the most pervasive and promising technology of our time. Differently from thermal plasmas, the potentialities offered by non-equilibrium plasmas, especially if working at atmospheric pressure, are still far away to be totally understood, since the surprising and sometimes unpredictable results, coming from studies carried out all over the world, bring out the growing versatility of this technology and its suitability for many applications intersecting our daily lives. The present dissertation, organized in two parts, is focused to present and discuss the results obtained from the Ph.D research activities carried out in the wide field of plasma and materials. The first part of the work is mainly aimed at investigating the potentialities of cold atmospheric plasmas (CAP) for the modification of materials, coating deposition and crosslinking of polymers. In the first two chapters, the conventional techniques and the CAP approaches most employed to carry out the processes will be briefly summarized. In the other chapters, organized by topic, the results achieved during the Ph.D research activities in the fields of surface material modification, coating deposition and crosslinking of polymers will be presented and discussed. The second part of the dissertation is linked to the investigation of the potentialities of plasma-induced chemistry in a liquid environment for the synthesis of nanostructures. Similarly to the first one, the second part of the dissertation will present an overview on the conventional and CAP assisted methods for nanostructures synthesis; moreover, in the second part of the last chapter, the Ph.D experimental activities aimed at synthesising CuO quantum dots in a liquid environment will be illustrated.