Abstract:Dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) is hot focus of the discharge technology at present, which owns some advantages, such as simplicity, low cost, easy operation, low-energy consumption, extensive usages and so on. When the DBD reactor worked with two electrodes, the non-thermal plasma (NTP) was ignited by Ar, He, N2, O2 or their mixtures as working gas, which could produce a large amount of X-ray, free radicals, ions, excited atoms and other highly active substances. Hence, the NTP is capable of providing sufficient energy for many chemical reactions. Although the NTP technique could be employed to the nearly whole agricultural production chain from the environment to products, the applications of DBD in agricultural field were just at the beginning step so far. According to the recent references, the detailed conditions of DBD application in agricultural breeding, sterilization, processing and storage, mechanization and engineering, environmental protection, and agro-food quality and safety were introduced. For breeding, DBD could be applied to microbial mutation and seed quality treatment;for the processing of agricultural product, DBD could be employed to sterilization, washing, starch modification, fruit and vegetable storage via ethylene degradation, and so on;for equipment, DBD could be used as a core unit for the ozone generator;for environment protection, DBD could be utilized to degrade microbes, pesticide and veterinary residues, persistent organic pollutants and others in water and soil, and particle matter (PM), total hydrocarbon (THC), NOx, etc. in tail gas from machines;for analytical instrumentation, DBD usually served as an ionization source for mass spectrometry, and an atomizer and excitation unit for atomic spectrometry. In addition, in order to improve the modern agriculture development and protect human’s health and safety, the critical characterization and problems, and the future development for the DBD techniques in agricultural fields mentioned above were analyzed and discussed.
