2. Materials andmethods
2.1. Plasma reactor and electrical circuit
The seeds were treated by non-thermal plasma using a surface
discharge reactor, at atmospheric pressure and room temperature.
The set-up is illustrated in Fig. 1.
The plasma reactor consists of two electrodes placed on both sides of
a glass plate (length 120 mm, width 90 mm, thickness 1.5 mm). The
high voltage electrode is an array of 13 copper wires, each wire having
a diameter of 100 μmand length of 44 mm. The distance between adjacent
wires was 6 mm. The ground electrode was an aluminium tape
(length 90 mm, width 48 mm). The seeds were distributed uniformly
on each wire. The plasma reactor was placed in a rectangular case and
air was flown with a rate of 1 L/min.
The dischargewas generated in a.c.mode using a high voltage transformer
(TIRB 0–20, Electroputere, Romania, transformation ratio 300),