Abstract
Thermal plasma pyrolysis is a powerful technology for converting waste or low-value materials to valuable gaseous hydrocarbons. This paper presents for the first time the hydropyrolysis of n-hexane and toluene in a rotating-arc plasma reactor. Effects of the mole ratio of H/C in the feed, power input and magnetic induction were investigated to evaluate the reaction performance. A lower H/C ratio could lead to a lower yield of C2H2 and lower specific energy consumption, and there existed an optimum range of power input for both n-hexane and toluene pyrolysis within the investigated range. The yield of C2H2 in n-hexane and toluene pyrolysis could reach 85% and 68%, respectively, with respective specific energy consumption (SEC) of 13.8 kWh/kg·C2H2 and 19.9 kWh/kg·C2H2. Compared with the results reported in literature, the rotating-arc plasma process showed higher C2H2 yield and lower energy consumption, which is attributed to the better initial mixing of the reactant with the hot plasma gas and the more uniform temperature distribution.
Highlights
The plasma process has emerged as an innovative way to convert various carbonaceous materials to valuable chemicals [1]
The non-thermal plasma has the nature of non-equilibrium in the electron and the heavy particle temperature [15], which is beneficial for the initiation of chemical reaction under relatively lower temperature and energy input [4,16]
The hydropyrolysis of liquid hydrocarbons including n-hexane and toluene in a rotating-arc plasma was investigated for the first time
Summary
The plasma process has emerged as an innovative way to convert various carbonaceous materials to valuable chemicals [1]. The materials vary diversely, including gaseous hydrocarbon [2,3,4], liquid hydrocarbon [5,6], coal [7,8], polymer [9,10], biomass [11,12] and solid waste [13,14], etc., and the target products differ from syngas to valuable chemicals such as acetylene, ethylene and carbon nanotube. The chemical process usually suffers from lower conversion efficiency and lower throughput in non-thermal plasma reactor. The thermal plasma [17,18]
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