Study on Abatement of Toluene by Alterable Frequency Dielectric Barrier Discharge

Abstract

Abatement of gaseous toluene via alterable frequency dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma in a coaxial cylindrical reactor was carried out at atmospheric pressure and room temperature. During plasma processing to decompose toluene, discharge power was analyzed by using the Q-V Lissajous diagram. It suggested that, the specific energy density (SED) increased with the increasing of electric field intensity and AC frequency, respectively. Furthermore, the abatement efficiency had the similar trend with SED as the functions of electric field intensity and AC frequency, respectively. In addition, the trend of the energy efficiency was opposite. It declined with the enhancement of electric field intensity and AC frequency. However, low energy efficiency doesn't mean low abatement efficiency. With the augment of input energy, the abatement efficiency and the abatement amount ascended correspondingly. Take the result of 13.8kV/cm for example, when frequency increased from 50Hz to 300Hz, the energy efficiency dropped from 12.6g/kWh to 2.6g/kWh, whereas the abatement amount ascended from 1294mg/m <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> to 1766mg/m <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> , and the abatement efficiency enhanced from 64.7% to 88.3%. So it could help to find optimizing parameters to remove toluene on condition of relatively reasonable low energy consuming.