Steam enhanced carbon dioxide reforming of methane in DBD plasma reactor

Abstract

Considering the inevitable high energy input to implement the CO 2 reforming of methane under high-temperature operation using conventional catalysis method, the low temperature conversion of CO 2 and methane in the coaxial dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma reactor was investigated in this work. Steam was introduced to enhance the CO 2 reforming of methane with synergetic catalysis effect by cold plasma and catalyst. The experimental results showed that a certain percent of steam could promote the conversion of both CH 4 and CO 2. Meanwhile, the carbon deposition was evidently reduced compared with the dry reforming of methane. With the increase of steam input, the steam reforming occurred predominantly. As a result, the hydrogen volume percentage in the product gases increased. In this way, the products with different H 2/CO ratio could be achieved by changing the mole ratio of CH 4/CO 2/H 2O at the reactor inlet. In particular, when the mole ratio of H 2O/CH 4 increased to almost 3 corresponding to the pure steam reforming process, the conversion of CH 4 reached almost 0.95 and the selectivity to H 2 was almost 0.99 at 773K.