Study Of Methane Conversion Using Dielectric-barrier Discharge Plasmas

Petroleum is gradually decreasing. Therefore, more and more attention and evaluation have been focused on natural gas that is reseved much more in the world than petroleum. Methane, as a major component, has been paid more attention for several decades. With the lack of crude oil, the development of nature gas utilization for producing chemicals has a long term strategy influence.Plasma technology served as an unconventional catalysis has been widely used in methane conversion. Dielectric-barrier discharges (DBD) comprise a specific insulative dielectric of gaseous discharges that typically operate in the near-atmospheric pressure range. Dielectric-barrier discharge is a kind of non-equilibrium cold plasma. Characteristics of methane conversion using dielectric-barrier discharge plasmas were studied in this paper. In this paper, both reactions of CH4 to produce hydrocarbons and conversion of CH4 and H2 to hydrocarbons through dielectric-barrier discharge of nonequilibrium plasma reaction were studied. The effect of parameters of the electric field and reaction conditions both reactions and the characteristics of energy consumption under different technology conditions were investigated. The conversion of CH4, yield and selectivity of hydrocarbons under different flow rate and electric field were investigated. The characteristics of coke were studied. According to the result of experiment, the reaction mechanism of CH4 was studied. The theory on the design and operation of plasma reactor was obtained.In this paper,reactions of pure CH4 catalysed by dielectric-barrier discharge of nonequilibrium plasma were studied. The products contain larger amount of ethane and propane and less amount of butane, acetylene and ethylene. A little coke deposited on the electrode. When H2 was added, the products contained large amount of ethane and propane and less amount of acetylene and ethylene. The coke deposited on electrode. For CH4 reaction, both conversion of CH4 and selectivity of C2H6 and C3H8 were reduced while the flow rate of CH4 was increased,energy efficiency was also increased. For CH4 reaction, when the input power was increased, the conversion of CH4 and the selectivity of H2 and the yield of C2H6 and C3H8 were slowly increased, while the selectivity of C2H6 and C3H8 were reduced. The conversion of CH4 was slowly increased as the increasing reaction time. The time is about 1.5 hour. The...