Synergistic effect of plasma power and temperature on the cracking of toluene in the N2 based product gas

Faisal Saleem; Asif Hussain Khoja; Rabia Sharif; Abdul Rehman; Salman Raza Naqvi; Umair Yaqub Qazi; Kui Zhang; Adam Harvey

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e14237

Synergistic effect of plasma power and temperature on the cracking of toluene in the N₂ based product gas

Heliyon. 2023 Mar 5;9(3):e14237. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e14237. eCollection 2023 Mar.

Authors

Faisal Saleem¹, Asif Hussain Khoja², Rabia Sharif¹, Abdul Rehman¹, Salman Raza Naqvi³, Umair Yaqub Qazi⁴, Kui Zhang⁵, Adam Harvey⁵

Affiliations

¹ Chemical and Polymer Engineering Department, UET Lahore, Faisalabad Campus, Pakistan.
² Fossil Fuels Laboratory, Department of Thermal Energy Engineering, U.S-Pakistan Centre for Advanced Studies in Energy (USPCAS-E), National University of Sciences & Technology (NUST), Sector H-12, Islamabad, 44000, Pakistan.
³ School of Chemical & Materials Engineering, National University of Sciences & Technology, 44000, Islamabad, Pakistan.
⁴ Department of Chemistry, College of Science, University of Hafr Al Batin, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
⁵ School of Engineering, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, United Kingdom.

Abstract

In this research, a dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) reactor is used to study the cracking of the toluene into C₁-C₆ hydrocarbons. The combined effect of parameters such as temperature (20-400 °C) and plasma power (10-40 W) was investigated to evaluate the DBD reactor performance. The main gaseous products from the decomposition of toluene include lower hydrocarbon (C₁-C₆). The cracking of toluene increases with power at all temperatures (20-400 °C). On the otherhand, it decreases from 92.8 to 73.1% at 10 W, 97.2 to 80.5% at 20, 97.5 to 86.5% at 30 W, and 98.4 to 93.7% at 40 W with raising the temperature from 20 to 400 °C. Nonetheless, as the temperature and plasma input power increase, the methane yield increases. At 40 W, the maximum methane yield was 5.1%. At 10 and 20 W, the selectivity to C₂ increases as the temperature rises up to 400 °C. At 30 and 40 W, it began to drop after 300 °C due to the formation of methane and the yield of methane increases significantly beyond this temperature.

Keywords: Biomass gasification; Lower hydrocarbons; Non-thermal plasma; Tar removal.