Application of non-thermal plasma on gas cleansing

Non-thermal plasma technologies are an interesting complement or alternative, for some conventional systems used for gas pollution control (i.e. wet scrubbers and catalytic converters) because they are able to remove simultaneously several gas pollutants, with quite good efficiency at a relatively low-energy consumption. In this work, a dielectric barrier discharge was used to remove nitric oxides (NO_x) and sulfur dioxide (SO₂) from a mixture of air and water vapor. A chemical model was developed to obtain a toxic gas removal mechanism and to observe the behavior of the species in the plasma. The influence of water vapor addition on the toxic gases removal efficiency is also investigated. Several experimental parameters such as power, frequency, initial concentration of NO_x and SO₂ were tested and analyzed. Results of numerical simulation demonstrated good agreement with experimental data of the removal process achieving about 95% of efficiency removal of toxic gases studied.