Abstract
Nitrogen is an essential element to plants, animals, human beings and all the other living things on earth. Nitrogen fixation, which converts inert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia or other valuable substances, is a very important part of the nitrogen cycle. The Haber-Bosch process plays the dominant role in the chemical nitrogen fixation as it produces a large amount of ammonia to meet the demand from the agriculture and chemical industries. However, due to the high energy consumption and related environmental concerns, increasing attention is being given to alternative (greener) nitrogen fixation processes. Among different approaches, plasma-assisted nitrogen fixation is one of the most promising methods since it has many advantages over others. These include operating at mild operation conditions, a green environmental profile and suitability for decentralized production. This review covers the research progress in the field of plasma-assisted nitrogen fixation achieved in the past five years. Both the production of NOx and the synthesis of ammonia are included, and discussion on plasma reactors, operation parameters and plasma-catalysts are given. In addition, outlooks and suggestions for future research are also given.
Highlights
Nitrogen was discovered in the late 18th century by Daniel Rutherford, and it was called noxious air or azote, which means “no life” due to the asphyxiate property
1970s, the interest in ammonia synthesis using plasma technology has been increased [102,103,104,105] and, in particular, great efforts have been made in terms of plasma reactor design, catalysts development and the study of the reaction mechanism
Hong et al [122] investigated this effect by adding argon in a pack-bed DBD reactor. They added 10 sccm of Ar to the feed gas stream consisting of 30 sccm of N2 and 30 sccm of H2. They observed an increase in the discharge power, uniformity and gas temperature, and those factors lead to higher ammonia production rates
Summary
Nitrogen was discovered in the late 18th century by Daniel Rutherford, and it was called noxious air or azote, which means “no life” due to the asphyxiate property. According to the research done by Smil et al and Erisman et al [9,12,13], around 40% of the world population was making use of fertilizers by the end of the 20th century This number increased to 48% by 2008, which indicates the enormous contribution made by the industrial nitrogen fixation. Water splitting using electricity has been suggested as a replacement of natural gas as the hydrogen source This strategy is only of interest if renewable electricity is used, as the overall energy consumption will largely increase to circa 1.5 MJ/mol (three times higher than the H-B process [22]). Considering the environmental profile, plasma processes have a great advantage by directly using abundant material like air and water, without relying on expensive H2 , and could be powered by electricity generated from renewable resources such as wind or solar energy.
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