Carbon dioxide reforming of methane using a non thermal plasma Effect of power supply on plasma-catalyst interaction

Introduction A lot of research has been done in catalytic reforming of methane with carbon dioxide. However, the major drawback of the reaction is the cost of the process which requires temperatures between 800 and 1000°C. In these fields, significant advantages are currently expected from non traditional approaches to catalysis. One of these new approaches consists to perform the chemical activation of reactants by a plasma generated by an electric gas discharge [1]. Non-thermal plasma is an effective tool to generate energetic electrons, which can initiate plasma chemical processes such as ionization, dissociation and excitation at room temperature. The use of a catalyst in combination with a non-thermal plasma has been studied but the results published in the literature are often contradictory [2,3], most probably because of the important differences in the plama reactor configuration used (gas gap distance, deposited power range, nature of dielectric, electric source . AC, DC, microwave, pulse...). In this context, the main objective of the present study was to investigate the interaction between gas discharges and a catalyst and to elucidate the role of the excited species. It is known that the performances of a plasma process depend on many parameters such as temperature, contact time, nature of dilutant, input power... the effect of those parameters was shown elsewhere [4]. In this study, we will only present the influence of the molar ratio CH4/CO2 on the reactants conversion before describing the plasma-catalyst interaction .