Biomethane reforming in DBD nonequilibrium plasma

Summary form only given. There are several publications claiming to describe production of hydrogen from biogas using plasma-catalyst systems¹. However, the authors has used a mixture of methane with carbon dioxide simulating a biogas but without any additives which are present in real biogas such as water vapour, H₂S and NH₃. Such a simple simulation of biogas is not appropriate when the outlet gas is going to be used with fuel cells, which are very sensitive to H₂S traces. There are only 2 papers on using real biogas and they were published by one research group in 2008 and 2010. Sekine et al.^2,3 studied application of pulsed corona discharge (PCD) reactor and dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) reactor without any catalyst and they found that PCD could convert biomethane into syngas and H₂S into solid sulfur simultaneously. This is due to the high electron energy of PCD and the electron has enough energy to dissociate C-C bond and C-S bond. On the other hand, DBD could convert H₂S into solid sulfur too, but methane and CO₂ in the biogas were not reacted at lower input power. The investigation by Sekine et al. showed that proper choice of electrical discharge can brings elective reaction for dry reforming of biomethane and desulfurization, and this is due to the correlation between the bond dissociation energy of each molecule and electron energy level of each discharge. Our proposal is to verify this conclusion by parametrical studies of biomethane reforming using DBD and real biogas or a mixture simulating biogas with its trace components (influence of voltage pulses shape, duration and frequency, influence of reactor geometry).