Methane Conversion into Hydrogen Using DBD Plasma Reactor

In this work, methane decomposition method has been used to generate hydrogen gas with the application of plasma. A simple dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma reactor was investigated for this purpose. The DBD plasma reactor is a device which contains two metallic electrodes layered by a dielectric, filled with pure methane (CH4) and supplied by a sinusoidal voltage, under an atmospheric pressure and at period frequency of 50 kHz. The reactor was modeled by a zero-dimensional plasma kinetic model included in ZDPlasKin code to study its behavior. This model allowed us to investigate the electrical and kinetic properties of the discharge such as the discharge current density, deposited power density, the species concentration, methane conversion, and hydrogen yield.