Chemicals from carbon dioxide in a technical scale low temperature plasma reactor from the chemical engineering viewpoint

Summary form only given, as follows. Classical industrial processes using carbon dioxide are connected to a lot of difficulties because of its high activation energy. There need to be made high efforts with sensitive catalysts and solvent systems to achieve acceptable yields. Therefrom, one can still find just a few industrial processes dealing with CO/sub 2/ as a reactant. In the last 30 years, plasma activation of CO/sub 2/ as a possible solution, was described in many publications. But because of several technological reasons there is still no running technical scale process. In contrast to these fundamental researches we are focussing on the chemical, thermodynamical and engineering issues of this technology. The plasma reactor, is closing the gap between laboratory research and a future industrial process. It is now possible to work with streams up to 100 m/sup 3//h at atmospheric pressure using a microwave plasma with a power up to 6 kW. We are looking at several chemical reactions for CO/sub 2/ utilization, including hydrogenation, reforming reactions and hydroformylation from the chemical-engineering point of view.