Treatment of volatile organic compounds using secondary emission electron gun

Summary form only given. Emission of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) is a serious environmental problem. It is well known that the nonthermal plasma processes using electrical discharge or electron beam are effective for the pollutant removal. Especially, the electron beam can efficiently remove pollutant, because a lot of radicals which are useful to remove pollutant can be easily produced by high energy electrons. A pulsed low energy (<100 keV) large cross-section ion induced secondary emission electron gun using wire ion plasma source has been developed. The device offers several inherent advantages such as compact in size, wide and uniform electron beams. Besides, the device offers good capability in high repetition rate pulsed operation with easy control compared with glow discharge or field emission control cathode guns. In present study, benzene that is one of popular VOCs was improved by using our devices. The removal characteristics have been studied under the gun voltage, varied pulsed electron beam parameters such as current density and pulse width as well as gas flow rate. The primary experimental results will be shown