Song HG  Chun YN

Vol. 26,  No. 1, pp. 72-78, Mar.  2020
10.7464/ksct.2020.26.1.72

Plasma Greenhouse gas Biogas Syngas

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The use of fossil fuel and biogas production causes air pollution and climate change problems. Research endeavors continue to focus on converting methane and carbon dioxide, which are the major causes of climate change, into quality energy sources. In this study, a novel plasma-carbon converter was proposed to convert biogas into high quality gas, which is linked to photovoltaic and wind power and which poses a problem on generating electric power continuously. The characteristics of conversion and gas production were investigated to find a possibility for biogas conversion, involving parametric tests according to the change in the main influence variables, such as O2/C ratio, total gas feed rate, and CO2/CH4 ratio. A higher O2/C ratio gave higher conversions of methane and carbon dioxide. Total gas feed rate showed maximum conversion at a certain specified value. When CO2/CH4 feed ratio was decreased, both conversions increased. As a result, the production of solar fuel by plasma oxidation destruction-carbon material gasification conversion, which was newly suggested in this study, could be known as a possibly useful technology. When O2/C ratio was 0.8 and CO2/CH4 was 0.67 while the total gas supply was at 40 L min-1 (VHSV = 1.37), the maximum conversions of carbon dioxide and methane were achieved. The results gave the highest production for hydrogen and carbon dioxide which were high-quality fuel.