| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
OKITSU Kenji Nagasaki University, Faculty of Engineering, Research Fellow, 工学部, 助手 (60295095)
MATSUMOTO Hiroshige Nagasaki University, Faculty of Engineering, Professor, 工学部, 教授 (10039787)
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| Research Abstract |
To produce hydrogen from the natural gas and water some plasma reactors and reaction system were investigated for three years since 1998. Two types of the reactors, i.e., dielectric-barrier discharge (DBD) type and packed bed discharge type reactors were made and examined. The former reactor was consisted of a cylindrical Cu rod (inner electrode), quartz-glass tube, and a piece of Cu foil tape (outer electrode). High voltage electric power was applied between two electrodes, and the plasma occurred in a small space between inner electrode and quartz tube. The natural gas and water reacted through such small plasma zone. Then, hydrogen was produced. During the reaction, some carbon species were produced by cracking of methane because C2 radicals were observed with emission spectroscopy. These carbon species were quite active, and could react with excited water molecules in the plasma zone. We concluded that methane was easily converted to hydrogen with water, via active carbon species on electrode surface. The latter reactor was consisted of two electrodes and pelletized BaTiO3. BaTiO3 was placed between two disc-type electrode. High voltage was applied between the electrodes, and plasma occurred small space between BaTiO3 grains. The performance of this reactor is not better than that of dielectric barrier discharge reactor because the reaction conditions were not optimized. We expected that the packed bed reactor would show similar performance with DBD reactor if optimized condition could be found out.
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