Indoor air quality improvement and purification by atmospheric pressure Non-Thermal Plasma (NTP)

Prince Junior Asilevi; Patrick Boakye; Sampson Oduro-Kwarteng; Bernard Fei-Baffoe; Yen Adams Sokama-Neuyam

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-02276-1

Indoor air quality improvement and purification by atmospheric pressure Non-Thermal Plasma (NTP)

Sci Rep. 2021 Nov 24;11(1):22830. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-02276-1.

Authors

Prince Junior Asilevi¹, Patrick Boakye², Sampson Oduro-Kwarteng¹, Bernard Fei-Baffoe³, Yen Adams Sokama-Neuyam⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Civil Engineering, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana.
² Department of Chemical Engineering, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana. patrickboakye@knust.edu.gh.
³ Department of Environmental Science, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana.
⁴ Department of Petroleum Engineering, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana.

Abstract

Non-thermal plasma (NTP) is a promising technology for the improvement of indoor air quality (IAQ) by removing volatile organic compounds (VOCs) through advanced oxidation process (AOP). In this paper, authors developed a laboratory scale dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) reactor which generates atmospheric NTP to study the removal of low-concentration formaldehyde (HCHO), a typical indoor air VOC in the built environment associated with cancer and leukemia, under different processing conditions. Strong ionization NTP was generated between the DBD electrodes by a pulse power zero-voltage switching flyback transformer (ZVS-FBT), which caused ionization of air molecules leading to active species formation to convert HCHO into carbon dioxide (CO₂) and water vapor (H₂O). The impact of key electrical and physical processing parameters i.e. discharge power (P), initial concentration (C_in), flow rate (F), and relative humidity (RH) which affect the formaldehyde removal efficiency (ɳ) were studied to determine optimum conditions. Results show that, the correlation coefficient (R²) of removal efficiency dependence on the processing parameters follow the order R² (F) = 0.99 > R² (RH) = 0.96, > R² (C_in) = 0.94 > R² (P) = 0.93. The removal efficiency reached 99% under the optimum conditions of P = 0.6 W, C_in = 0.1 ppm, F = 0.2 m³/h, and RH = 65% with no secondary pollution. The study provided a theoretical and experimental basis for the application of DBD plasma for air purification in the built environment.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't