Pollution control and depollution processes by plasma techniques

The European Union is creating strict standards for air and water pollution and waste treatment and implementing aggressive regulations. Compliance with these regulations is impossible without the development of new depollution processes involving plasma or laser technology. Time is one of the major problems in monitoring pollutants with the use of the time-resolution laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy technique, which can perform online analysis without sampling with a high level sensitivity for all the species of the Periodic Table. Plasma-enhanced desorption from fly ashes or polluted soils associated with a mass spectrometer or an optical emission spectrometer allows the monitoring of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and organochlorine species in a few seconds. In the last DBD point, we present the treatment of VOCs in air by the plasma technique in order to destroy or trap PAH molecules.