Preliminary study of synergetic effect of non-thermal plasma and photocatalysis coupling on pollutant gases purification

The work has proposed a method of non-thermal plasma-photocatalysis coupling (PPC). The needle matrix to plate corona discharge reactor is set as plasma source, and the discharge electrodes is coated with TiO2 photocatalyst. The spectrum characteristics of non-thermal plasma (NTP) were tested, which identified that UV lights are generated in NTP and was utilized to determine the operation conditions of NTP. Meanwhile, bench-scale experiments have been conducted to treat pollutant gases from cigarette smoke that include the components of NOx, HCHO, NH3, (CH3)(3)CSH, (CH3)(3)N, etc. The results have shown that the PPC treatment can increase removal efficiencies significantly as well as reduce toxic by-products, which means that the PPC method has a synergetic effect on pollutant gases purification. The possible reason is that plasma chemical reaction and photocatalysis occur simultaneously under the synthetic effects of HV electric field, electrons, ions and UV lights.