During the past few years the fight against air pollution has risen to a worldwide problem and has become one of the main challenges facing governments and worldwide institutions. It is a fact that conventional technologies are not efficient enough to face this problem so the necessity to develop new solutions and focus on different approaches is imperative and unavoidable. In particular, the goal is to avoid the continuously destruction of the atmosphere by treating the air and removing its pollutants, otherwise reducing its concentration to permitted levels for the human health. The present thesis focuses on carrying out an experimental study of VOCs removal using a non-­thermal plasma technology. With a proper experimental setup, toluene was selected as the pollutant molecule to simulate the VOCs and during the experiments a homemade dielectric barrier discharge reactor was used. While plasma was assisting thermal oxidation reactions, the toluene removal efficiency was investigatedin terms of initial concentration of the pollutant, voltage of the discharges and gas ratio. Moreover, in further experiments the gas flow mixture was ignited in order to study the combined effect of plasma and combustion on toluene removal efficiency. Finally, the formation of ozone due to the plasma performance was studied in the flue gas.

Outgoing