Plasma Assisted Catalytic Conversion of CO₂ and H₂O Over Ni/Al₂O₃ in a DBD Reactor

We present an innovative approach for reacting carbon dioxide and water to give syngas by combining heterogeneous catalysis and non-thermal plasma techniques. This approach utilizes an abundant water and nickel catalyst, and mitigates the thermodynamic penalty by using a Dielectric Barrier Discharge (DBD) plasma reactor. Argon dilution was used in the experiment to reduce the exothermic recombination of hydrogen and oxygen, which is considered as the major hurdle for H₂O conversion. As a result, the syngas ratio was dramatically improved from 0.07 to 0.86. In addition, the conversions of CO₂ and H₂O were improved by packing Ni/γ–Al₂O₃ catalysts into the DBD reactor. The yields of H₂ and CO were up to 13.8% and 5.6% respectively. The conditions for plasma catalysis and the catalyst characterization are presented and discussed.