Organized by the Zagreb Institute of Physics, the seventh Central European Symposium on Plasma Chemistry CESPC-7 is being held at LifeClass Termes in Sv. Martin na Muri from September 3 to 7, with more than a hundred participants from 24 countries. According to Slobodan Milošević, a researcher-scientist at the Institute of Physics and chair of this international scientific symposium, the topics of the symposium cover fundamental problems of plasma research, modeling and diagnostics, new materials, energy technologies, environmental protection, biomedical plasma technologies, and for the first time, new plasma technologies in food production and agriculture.
Milošević explains that plasma refers to a partially ionized gas consisting of a mixture of neutral molecules and atoms, including electrically charged particles such as electrons and ions. In such conditions of non-equilibrium plasmas, collisions of electrons with neutral molecules can create vibrational and electronic excitations of very high energies.
– This leads to a series of unusual chemical reactions that would not normally occur in a natural equilibrium environment. Since electrons can be easily heated in electric fields (using discharges or laser fields), a mechanism for initiating and controlling highly efficient endothermic chemical reactions is achieved. This opens up possibilities for chemical processing on a large scale using electrical energy produced from renewable or sustainable sources. The impact of such technologies on the global economy is enormous, and therefore it would be wrong to say that this will only be a technology of the future, said Milošević, adding that plasma chemistry is an interdisciplinary field that deals with chemical processes in plasma.
