Mechanism for the Plasma Reforming of Ethanol

Abstract

In conventional chemical processes, energy inputs in the form of heat energy and heats the reactor, and the reactions to the desired temperature resulting in high consumption. In non-thermal plasma forming, energy is put into the reactor in the form of electrical energy and then converted to a strong electric field. Therefore, most of the energy is delivered to the electrons and thus the electrons can keep the temperature and density high while the background gas molecules and the heavy particles maintain a relatively low temperature. On the one hand, this provides the non-thermal plasma environment with high activity and selectivity of certain reactions. In the plasma-catalytic reforming system, it guarantees low energy consumption and efficiency of non-thermal plasma technology. In the plasma-catalytic reforming system, the recombination of plasma can offer a reaction temperature for the catalytic reaction; besides, the plasma can also act directly on the catalyst to change the physical and chemical properties of the catalyst; at the same time, with the supplement of the plasma recombination, the catalyst can also cause a future transformation of the unreacted reforming substrates and the non-targeted products, which promotes the selectivity of the target product (H2). Based on the above considerations, this chapter will respectively analyze the microscopic procedure of single non-thermal arc plasma reforming and non-thermal arc plasma-catalytic reforming, which will help to understand the types and distribution of the reforming production and give a relative guideline to the direction of the improvement of the reforming process [1].