The following articles might help:

Tsytovich, V.; Gusein-Zade, N.; Morfill, G., "Dust-dust interactions and formation of helical dust structures," Plasma Science, IEEE Transactions, 32, 2, 637-652 (2004).

V N Tsytovich and G E Morfill and V E Fortov and N G Gusein-Zade and B A Klumov and S V Vladimirov, "From plasma crystals and helical structures towards inorganic living matter", New Journal of Physics, 9 8 263 (2007).

Kamimura, Tetsuo, and Osamu Ishihara. "Coulomb double helical structure." Physical Review E 85.1 016406 (2012).

It seems to me that the class of helical structures described in the papers quoted by Bacharis falls within the broader class of helical structures discussed in the enclosed paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.6959).

In fact, in this paper it is shown that a Faddeev-Niemi non-linear sigma model describes in the long wavelength limit a wide class of steady-state, knotted configurations of physical systems far from thermodynamical equilibrium where all following assumptions are satisfied:

a) they are stable against perturbations of temperature;

b) they interact weakly with the external world;

c) they exhibit negligible temperature gradients;

d) Coulomb interactions are effectively screened;

e) entropy is mainly produced through Joule and viscous heating,

f) inertial effects are negligible in comparison with diffusion effects (or, alternatively, the assumption of "local thermodynamic equilibrium" holds).

If, furthermore, g) the Gauss linking number is lower than a threshold, then the model describes filamentary structures.

Regardless of their detailed microscopic structure, in the long wavelength limit stable filaments adjust themselves in order to offer minimum resistance to the medium (fluid, plasma) embedding them and to the electric currents (if any) flowing across them. 

The resulting structures exhibit heicoidal symmetry. 

These structures include a broad class of filamentary structures routinely observed in Dense Plasma Focus physics [H. Herold, A. Jerzykiewicz, M. Sadowski, H. Schmidt, , Nucl. Fusion  29 , 1255 (1989)].

(However, they seem to be relevant to many other fields, as spontaneous relaxation to knotted configurations turns out to be e.g. the final outcome of the evolution of waves propagating across dispersive media described by non-linear Schroedinger equation [A. S. Desyatnikov, D. Buccoliero, M. R. Dennis, Y. S. Kivshar, Scientific Reports 2, 771 (2012)]). 

If the conclusions of the enclosed paper are confirmed, then irreversibility affects the very topology of the final outcome of a relaxation process which leads to the spontaneous formation of helicoidal structures both in dusty plasmas and Dense Plasma Focus plasmas. In a nutshell, thermodynamics is the same.