2013 Volume 34 Issue 10 Pages 541-546
In these days, plasmas generated in high-density medium, such as high-pressure gas and liquid, have received much attention to materials processing, especially nanomaterials synthesis. In this paper, the current states of the research of plasmas generated in supercritical fluids, namely supercritical fluid plasmas, such as its generation, characterization and application to the synthesis of nanomaterials are reviewed. Especially, we focus on preparation of various carbon nanomaterials, such as carbon nanotube and diamondoids (diamond molecules) by supercritical plasmas near the critical points, in which the density fluctuation caused by the supercritical condition close to critical points might promote the formation of such carbon nanostructured materials. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of supercritical fluid plasma as high-performance materials processing, such as high-rate and low-temperature, and non-equilibrium processing.
