Study of butyraldehyde degradation and by-products formation by using a surface plasma discharge in pilot scale: Process modeling and simulation of relative humidity effect

The purpose of this paper is to study the butyraldehyde (Buty) conversion using dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) in a continuous reactor at pilot scale. One of the focused-on parameters in this study is relative humidity, which effect on (i) butyraldehyde removal (ii) selectivity of CO2 and CO, and (iii) intermediate byproducts and ozone formation was investigated using a DBD reactor with planar configuration. The results showed that at pilot scale, adding a small amount of water vapor in air enhances the processes performance and 10% increase in Buty removal efficiency was observed. A kinetic degradation model was also proposed, which takes into account the relative humidity influence. Active species due to water dissociation are integrated in the model. To represent the chemical degradation pathway, we supposed, in a first step, that an equivalent intermediate compound (EI) is formed directly from Buty. Then, in a second step, this EI is oxidized by active species into CO2 and CO in the discharge zone. This approach that also considers the competition effect between actives species improved the concordance between simulated results and experiments with a satisfactory overall description of the degradation and byproducts formation. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.