Steam enhanced carbon dioxide reforming of methane in DBD plasma reactor

Considering the inevitable high energy input to implement the CO2 reforming of methane under high-temperature operation using conventional catalysis method, the low temperature conversion of CO2 and methane in the coaxial dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma reactor was investigated in this work. Steam was introduced to enhance the CO2 reforming of methane with synergetic catalysis effect by cold plasma and catalyst. The experimental results showed that a certain percent of steam could promote the conversion of both CH4 and CO2. Meanwhile, the carbon deposition was evidently reduced compared with the dry reforming of methane. With the increase of steam input, the steam reforming occurred predominantly. As a result, the hydrogen volume percentage in the product gases increased. In this way, the products with different H2/CO ratio could be achieved by changing the mole ratio of CH4/CO2/H2O at the reactor inlet. In particular, when the mole ratio of H2O/CH4 increased to almost 3 corresponding to the pure steam reforming process, the conversion of CH4 reached almost 0.95 and the selectivity to H2 was almost 0.99 at 773K.