NOVEL REACTORS FOR PLASMA APPLICATIONS

With the availability of efficient and reliable torches for thermal plasma generation, industrial interest has turned to the design of novel reactors capable of taking full advantage of this new energy source. This effort has resulted in a wide variety of designs, depending on the applications. The first of these were in the metallurgical field, but interest is now growing in the applications to high-temperature chemical processing. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate by means of a few examples the variety of reactor designs for both types of processing in the light of their performance at the industrial scale or, in the case of reactors for new chemical processing applications, on the basis of the assessment of their potential performance, provided by relatively small-scale pilot-plant investigations. © 1990.