Powders and Plasma Technology Laboratory (LTPP) at UFPR: Twenty Years Working with Green Pulsed DC Plasma

Abstract

In the last 20 years, since the LTPP foundation at UFPR, DC Plasma attained from Glow Discharge Processes has been increasingly used for Heat Treatment and Surface Thermochemical Treatment applications. Such practices agree very well with the predicted the Target 4 of Goal 12 ("Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns") of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development from the United Nations, which indicates by 2020, achieving environmentally sound management of chemicals and all wastes throughout their life cycle and significantly reduce their release to air (and also water and soil) to minimize their adverse impacts on human health and the environment 1. In this context, significant care has been mainly given to the R&D of Plasma Carburizing (Carburization) applied for different Stainless Steel classes and metals like Niobium, keeping in mind that the carburizing industrial processes extensively used in the past Century and even used nowadays in some places (namely the conventional gaseous, and/or liquid carburizing), are characteristically non-green technologies, since they usually release in the air, the processed endogas, and in fluvial systems, residues from cyanide and carbonate based salt baths, respectively. In this way, the present work emphasizes the good practice of using DC Plasma for Carburizing purposes, which is extensively used for different Mechanical and Metallurgical Engineering field applications.