Properties of naval steel surface after non-thermal plasma treatment

Improving corrosion resistance represents a highly interesting topic in the maritime field, having important economic consequences by reducing the maintenance costs or increasing the life expectancy of the final products and by imposing significant environmental impact. In accordance with new IMO (International Maritime Organization) regulations, different new clean technologies have been proposed for solving this particular issue, among them being also considered the technology based on plasma discharges, generally produced at reduced pressure. The proposed study concerns the opportunity of atmospheric plasma treatment for naval steel preparation or conditioning. Five different treatments, with three types of plasma working under different gases, have been used. Their effects were evaluated based on surface modification analysis. These analyses concern the roughness of the samples and the surface hydrophobicity at two different moments of time. There were used three types of reactors producing non-thermal plasma: GlidArc, Gliding Spark and Minitorch.