Non-equilibrium Dynamic Control of Plasma-assisted Methane Dry Reforming in Nanosecond-Pulsed Dielectric Barrier Discharge (DBD) Reactors

The increasing greenhouse gas production, majorly by the consumption of fossil fuels, has led to consequences of climate change since the last century. Methane and carbon dioxide as the major contributors to the greenhouse effect is desired to be restrained or re-captured in industry. Noble metals, such as Rh, Ru, and Pd have shown the highest catalytic activity and stability in the dry reforming process. However, noble metals are too expensive for mass production. Nickel (Ni) catalysts are promising candidates with high conversion demonstrated in research studies, but their high coke formation led to the deactivation that constitutes a major operational drawback. The dry reforming process has the potential to be optimized with non-equilibrium plasma. Due to its low temperature, (150–450 °C) and atmospheric pressure operation conditions, plasma-assisted catalytic dry reforming exhibits a higher reaction rate and stronger resistance to coking by the synergistic effect. In this work, dry reforming is studied with a uniquely designed Plasma-Assisted Nanosecond-Pulsed DBD Reactor with nickel (Ni) catalysts. Instead of a typical dielectric catalyst, the metal catalyst sheet set between two electrodes. The catalyst plays as an additional electrode layer in the DBD reactor. Such a setup generates two independent plasma sections on each side of the catalyst. Electric field-induced second harmonic generation (E-FISH) used to characterize the two electric fields independently. Dynamic control strategies may be added to further improve the reforming outcome and catalyst deactivation performance.