Plasma-Assisted Non-Oxidative Conversion of Methane over Mo/HZSM-5 Catalyst in DBD Reactor

Methane utilization has been recognized as a challenging research topic because methane is very stable with strong C–H bond. Many efforts have been devoted to find an effective method for the methane activation. In this work, we examined the feasibility of decreasing the temperature of a non-oxidative methane dehydroaromatization by using DBD plasma-catalyst hybrid system. Mo/HZSM-5 catalyst was prepared and then it was used for the DBD plasma-assisted methane dehydroaromatization reaction. When the DBD plasma was applied to the Mo/HZSM-5 catalytic reactor, methane was converted at much lower temperatures than the conventional methane dehydroaromatization process. It was also confirmed that benzene selectivity could be improved by enhancing the interaction between plasma and catalyst. These results imply that the non-oxidative methane dehydroaromatization could occur effectively at milder conditions than the conventional process by using the optimized DBD plasma-catalyst hybrid system. Moreover, it was observed that the catalyst deactivation was effectively prevented when H₂ gas was mixed with the reaction feed.