Plasma-Aided Reforming of Toluene and Isopropanol with Analysis of Decomposition Mechanism

This paper presents experimental methods, conditions and results of plasma-aided reforming of isopropanol and toluene in water steam atmosphere. The liquid feedstock is added to nitrogen gas by a syringe pump and fed into a drop tube reactor, passing through a fluctuating non-thermal plasma zone. A comparison between plasma and thermal reforming is conducted at similar test conditions, achieving similar gas temperatures in the reactor. In the plasma case, an energy input of about 1 kW is introduced into the reaction through a gliding arc, non-thermal plasma, while in the thermal case the energy is thermally fed through a steam superheater. The measured syngas production shows a significant plasma enhancement on individual syngas components (e.g. H 2 , CO, CH 4 ) using toluene. Furthermore, the reaction degree is calculated from the syngas-based carbon and hydrogen balance. Using isopropanol as feedstock, plasma increases the syngas-based carbon conversion from 35.5 to 50.2% and the hydrogen release from 47.3 to 70.1%. In the case of aromatic feedstock such as toluene, a carbon conversion from 1.2 to 9.2% and a rise of the hydrogen release from 2.1 to 29.8% is achieved. Based on hydrogen release, the reaction kinetics obtained through data-fitting in a first-order Arrhenius diagram, are accelerated from 0.43 to 0.81 s −1 and from 0.01 to 0.24 s −1 for plasma-assisted isopropanol and toluene reforming, respectively. An analysis of condensate from syngas shows that the decomposition products of toluene reforming include benzene, indene, naphthalene etc. Graphical Abstract