Review of packed-bed plasma reactor for ozone generation and air pollution control

Packed-bed plasma reactors, constructed by packing noncatalytic dielectric pellets inside nonthermal plasma reactors, have been demonstrated to effectively alleviate the major bottleneck encountered by nonthermal plasma, i.e., the energy efficiency needs to be further improved. As far as the environmental issues are concerned, packed-bed plasma reactors are mainly applied to ozone generation and gaseous pollutant removal. According to the available experimental data, for a given specific energy density, the energy efficiency for ozone generation and gaseous pollutant abatement obtained with packed-bed reactors, if compared to that of nonpacked reactors, could be 1.1-4.3 and 1.1-12 times higher, depending on the type of pollutant, the reactor geometry, and the packing pellets used. Nevertheless, it is worth noticing that the packing pellets suitable for ozone generation and pollutant removal are quite different. The influences of material, dielectric constant, size, and shape of the packing pellets on the performance for ozone generation and gaseous pollutant removal are comprehensively reviewed in this paper and guidelines for pellet selection are provided as well. For the single-stage plasma catalysis system, in which catalyst pellets are directly packed inside the plasma reactor, the physical parameters of catalyst would also have significant influence on the plasma characteristics and the performance. Therefore, the content of this review paper could provide useful information for single-stage plasma catalysis system from the viewpoint of plasma characteristics.