Degradation of CO2 through dielectric barrier discharge microplasma

The continually increasing use of fossil fuels throughout the world has caused carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration to grow rapidly in the atmosphere. Increasing CO2 emissions are the major cause of global warming, and a number of studies have been done to show the predicted effects of global warming. This paper reported a method of degradation of CO2 through dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma; a microplasma reactor was used to decompose CO2 into carbon monoxide (CO) at normal atmosphere and room temperature. Gas chromatography was used to analyze the compositions of the outlet gases. No carbon deposits were found in this work. A variety of parameters, such as feed flow rate, input power, frequency, discharge gap, and external electrode length were investigated. The effects of these parameters on CO2 conversion were examined. At the same time, the effects of feed flow rate and input power on the energy efficiency were studied. The results indicated that a higher conversion of CO2 can be realized with a lower feed flow rate, a limited higher input power and a lower frequency. However, a higher feed flow rate and a lower input power were beneficial for energy utilization. The discharge gap had a little effect on the conversion of CO2 in microplasma reactor. In this work, the highest conversion of CO2 was 18.0%, and the highest energy efficiency was 3.8%. The DBD microplasma is a promising method for decomposing CO2.(c) 2014 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd