Author(s)

K Yan, E J M van Heesch, A J M Pemen & S Nair

Abstract

Very important physical and chemical features of corona plasmas are electrons, ions and radicals generation. It is foreseen that the next generation gas cleaning system -called zero emission system, to remove polluting gases, heavy metals, and particles simultaneously, can be developed based on ions and radicals generated by corona plasmas. Potential applications are flue gas cleaning, odour control, inactivation of micro-organisms, wastewater cleaning, synthesis gas cleaning, methane reforming, hydrogen production from fossil fuels, material surface treatment, and nano-particle generation. There are two critical issues to be overcome for large-scale industrial applications. The first one is the capacity and the cost of repetitive pulsed power techniques, and the second is the total energy consumption. This paper discusses the most relevant fundamental investigations and system developments for pollution control and sustainable development. 1 Introduction With regard to pollution control and electrical discharges in gases, the most popular techniques used to be electrostatic precipitation and ozone generation. Both of them have a history of over a century. In the last 15 years, corona plasma techniques have been widely investigated for pollution control and sustainable development. Investigations have extended from odour treatment, indoor air cleaning, VOCs abatement, flue gas cleaning to methane reforming and hydrogen production [11. Corona plasmas are often used together with additional techniques in order to control by-products and to increase the efficiency. For

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