Synergistic effect of plasma power and temperature on the cracking of toluene in the N 2 based product gas.

In this research, a dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) reactor is used to study the cracking of the toluene into C-C hydrocarbons. The combined effect of parameters such as temperature (20-400 °C) and plasma power (10-40 W) was investigated to evaluate the DBD reactor performance. The main gaseous products from the decomposition of toluene include lower hydrocarbon (C-C). The cracking of toluene increases with power at all temperatures (20-400 °C). On the otherhand, it decreases from 92.8 to 73.1% at 10 W, 97.2 to 80.5% at 20, 97.5 to 86.5% at 30 W, and 98.4 to 93.7% at 40 W with raising the temperature from 20 to 400 °C. Nonetheless, as the temperature and plasma input power increase, the methane yield increases. At 40 W, the maximum methane yield was 5.1%. At 10 and 20 W, the selectivity to C increases as the temperature rises up to 400 °C. At 30 and 40 W, it began to drop after 300 °C due to the formation of methane and the yield of methane increases significantly beyond this temperature.