October 10—Drinking water is harmful to humans when polluted by harmful bacteria and alga. Generally, people adopt chlorine to disinfect drinking water, but some cancerogenic substances such as trichloromethane generated by chlorine and water are actually potential danger to humans. Thus, new sterile technique, especially represented by low-temperature nonequilibrium plasma is the research focus for the past few years.

Recently, prof. Wang Wenchun’s team from Ion and Electron Beams, the key laboratory of Ministry of Education, has made significant progress in plasma sterile technique. The paper entitled “Atmospheric Pressure Gas–Liquid Diffuse Nanosecond Pulse Discharge Used for Sterilization in Sewage”, of which the first author is the young teacher PhD Yang Dezheng, is published as cover paper in famous journal Plasma Process. Polymers.

Ambient temperature plasma sterile technique will not cause thermal injury to its product and secondary pollution to environment. It can inactivate general bacteria, fungus and virus, and compensate for the deficiency of previous physical and chemical sterile technique. Thus it is a hopeful new sterile technique of next generation. Yang Dezheng et al. adopt bipolar nanoseconds pulse power as excitation, realize a low-consumption, high-energy utilization and high-stability technique, and succeed in applying it into urban sewage purification.

Plasma Process. Polymers is a SCI journal under international publishing group WILEY-VCH. This journal mainly publishes papers about plasma modification and development in environmental and biomedical research field, and has an extremely high factor of influence in low-temperature plasma application.