Combustion-assisted plasma in fuel conversion

Abstract

The long history of plasma application for fuel conversion shows that reasonably low specific energy requirement has been achieved in most cases using non-equilibrium systems with relatively high local temperature ('warm' plasmas). Analysis of reasons for this trend presented in this paper indicates that transitional warm plasma discharge systems are optimal for large-scale fuel processing. This analysis also reveals one specific feature of warm discharges that was not discussed earlier: warm discharge-based plasma-chemical systems are very sensitive to gas temperature and chemical reactions. When temperature reaches the level that is high enough to support chemical reactions in a particular system (ignition temperature), chemical reactions produce high concentration of excited molecules, and these molecules form a basis for stepwise ionization. This results in a significant drop in the energy necessary to support electric discharge in the system for two reasons. First, stepwise ionization that requires relatively low electron energy overcomes direct ionization that is typical for low-temperature non-equilibrium plasmas and requires much higher ionization energy. Second, high temperature of surrounding gas reduces heat losses from the discharge channel, while a significant portion of the discharge energy in warm plasma systems should be spent to compensate these losses. Thus, an intensive chemical reaction, e.g. combustion, supports the existence of a warm electric discharge. © 2011 IOP Publishing Ltd.