Plasma Assisted Catalytic Conversion of CO2 and H2O Over Ni/Al2O3 in a DBD Reactor

Xintong Ma,Gadi Rothenberg,Liangliang Lin,Gerard Van Rooij,Rohit Chaudhary,Maria Ronda-Lloret,Fausto Gallucci,Sirui Li,Volker Hessel,N Raveendran Shiju

doi:10.1007/s11090-018-9931-1

Abstract

We present an innovative approach for reacting carbon dioxide and water to give syngas by combining heterogeneous catalysis and non-thermal plasma techniques. This approach utilizes an abundant water and nickel catalyst, and mitigates the thermodynamic penalty by using a Dielectric Barrier Discharge (DBD) plasma reactor. Argon dilution was used in the experiment to reduce the exothermic recombination of hydrogen and oxygen, which is considered as the major hurdle for H2O conversion. As a result, the syngas ratio was dramatically improved from 0.07 to 0.86. In addition, the conversions of CO2 and H2O were improved by packing Ni/γ–Al2O3 catalysts into the DBD reactor. The yields of H2 and CO were up to 13.8% and 5.6% respectively. The conditions for plasma catalysis and the catalyst characterization are presented and discussed.

Highlights

Global warming is a serious environmental issue that is exacerbated by the greenhouse effect
The addition of H2O led to a decline of the CO2 conversion and an increase of H 2 production, resulting in a rise of syngas ratio in product, this is in line with reported literature [7, 11, 13]
The current H 2O conversion is less than 2% and the syngas ratio is too low to be applied in the industrial production

Summary

Introduction

Global warming is a serious environmental issue that is exacerbated by the greenhouse effect. Mankind can work towards reducing this effect by decreasing the emission of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Plasma Chemistry and Plasma Processing (2019) 39:109–124 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the USA in 2016, the global annual temperature has increased at an average rate of 0.07 °C per decade since 1880 and at an average rate of 0.17 °C per decade since 1970 [2]. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 keeps an upward tendency from 370 ppm in 2000 to 405 ppm in 2018 [3]. To control the concentration of C O2 in the air, C O2 capture and utilization could be one of the attractive solutions for the mitigation of C O2 emissions

Methods

Results

Conclusion