Plasma cracking methane for hydrogen production in a pulsed dielectric barrier discharge

Abstract

Summary form only given. Because of the lack of crude oil resources all around the world, hydrogen resource has been developed for the feedstock instead of crude oil. As the cost-effective activation of methane, hydrogen production of the methane conversion has been extensively studied. In this paper, characteristics of the microsecond pulsed and nanosecond pulsed dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) ¹ are experimentally investigated to obtain the effect of pulse repetition rate and flow rate of CH ₄ on hydrogen production using plasma cracking. The gas productions were analyzed by gas chromatograph. The experimental results showed that the main productions are H ₂ , C ₂ H ₆ C ₂ H ₄ and C ₃ H ₈ ² . The conversion of methane and the yield of hydrogen are prominently affected by the pulse repetition rate and the flow rate of CH ₄ . The conversion of methane and the yield of hydrogen respectively reached a maximum of 29.5% and 14.3% when the pulse repetition rate was 2000 Hz and the flow rate was 25 ml/min. Moreover, it was found that the selectivity of the gas productions significantly increased with the decrease of pulse repetition rate. The selectivity of hydrogen increased with the decrease of flow rate of CH ₄ when the pulse repetition rate was 2000 Hz. Considering the formation of carbon and C4 in the reactor, the carbon balances for all the cases were calculated to be between 79.26% and 98.82%, which achieved a maximum of 98.82% when the flow rate of CH4 was 100 ml /min and the pulse repetition rate was 1000 Hz.