Low temperature plasma processing of CO2 conversion

CO2 gas has been widely accepted as a major greenhouse gas, leading to global warming and the current adverse climate changes. Therefore, the conversion of CO2 into value-added chemicals and fuels is considered as one of the main challenges of the 21st century. To achieve the transformation of CO2 into value-added chemicals or fuels, many approaches have been investigated. The basic mechanism of these approaches is either to split pure CO2 into CO and O2 or to involve the conversion of CO2 with a co-reactant to form new chemical compounds such as methanol. The existing traditional approaches are mainly thermo-catalytic methods, where pure CO2 splitting or conversion of CO2 with a co-reactant requires elevated temperature and rare earth metals as catalysts. Due to these limitations of the traditional thermal approaches, novel energy-efficient technologies are still sought.

One promising approach in this field, which has received little attention to date, is plasma technology. Plasma as an ionized gas can not only dissociate CO2 but also enable thermodynamically difficult reactions to occur at ambient conditions of temperature and pressure with reasonable energy cost. The significance of this project is to exploit a new and exciting area in plasma technology for energy storage.