Flexible porous materials play an important role in frontier science and technology fields. Surface modification will further endow the materials with diverse and excellent surface properties, and expand the scope of their applications in functional and intelligent wearable devices. Atmospheric pressure plasma technology has many advantages in treating the flexible materials, such as low temperature, low energy consumption, high efficiency, friendly environment, low cost, no change in material itself characteristics, suitability for roll-to-roll preparation, etc. Also, it presents good adaptability in applied environment and target materials. All these advantages meet the requirements of large area and low-cost surface modification of flexible porous materials.

In this paper, we review several researches of atmospheric pressure plasma surface modification of flexible porous materials used in advanced materials, new energy, environmental protection and biomedicine. The problems and challenges of stability and permeability encountered in uniformly treating the flexible and porous materials by atmospheric pressure plasma are presented. Then, we introduce our research work on atmospheric pressure plasma stable discharge, roll-to-roll coating treatment of permeability and uniformity. Finally, we introduce the breakthrough in and ideas on the deposition kinetics of nanoparticle thin films and their microstructure control by atmospheric pressure plasma.

However, there are still many challenges to be overcome in the applications of the methods in current situation. Basic characteristics, discharge modes of atmospheric pressure plasma and the relationships of plasma discharge to structure and property of the various treated materials need to be further explored. It is confirmed that the permeability and uniformity of the atmospheric pressure plasma treatment in flexible porous materials are very important and their in-depth investigations will promote the application of this method—a high efficient, environmentally-friendly and continuous way of realizing functional and intelligent wearable devices in the future.