A Review of New Development of Functional Induction Thermal Plasmas and its Applications to Materials Processing

This paper addresses a review of recent development of novel induction thermal plasma system. The induction thermal plasma (ITP) or inductively coupled thermal plasma (ICTP) can provide high gas temperature fields with little impurity contamination because it is sustained by inductive coupling technique. The gas temperature provided by the ICTP reaches to 10000–20000 K, which can heat the materials remarkably. These feature of the ICTP are useful to materials processing. Recently, some kinds of new ICTP systems have been developed for materials processing for application to high rate production of nanoparticles or high-speed modification of material surface etc. These are introduced briefly herein.