Decomposition of benzene as a biomass gasification tar in CH₄ carrier gas using non-thermal plasma: Parametric and kinetic study

In this work, the decomposition of benzene was studied with CH₄ using a dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) reactor. The experimental conditions such as input power, residence time, and concentration were varied to investigate the decomposition of benzene. The decomposition of benzene increased with increasing input power and residence time. The highest decomposition of benzene at 40 W and 2.86 s was 82.9%. The major gaseous products were H₂ and lower hydrocarbons (LHC) and the yield of these products also increases with input power and residence time. The percentage yield of H₂ increases from 0.65 to 5.18% by increasing input power from 5 to 40 W at 2.86 s. Similarly, the yield of LHC increases from 0.78 to 8.86% for benzene under the same reaction conditions. Hence, input power promoted the decomposition of tar compounds and enhanced the yield of gaseous products. However, at higher concentrations of the tar compound, decomposition efficiency and product yield decreased. The modified first-order kinetic model was used for the decomposition of tar model compound and methane carrier gas.