Degradation of trichloroethylene in a rod-in-tube pulsed dielectric barrier discharge reactor

The performance of a laboratory-scale pulsed dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) reactor for trichloroethylene (TCE) degradation was studied. The reaction process of degradation was discussed by the infrared spectroscopy analysis. The experimental results show that when the background gas was pure N ₂, the pulsed DBD could effectively destroy TCE molecules, and the removal efficiency clearly depended on the discharge parameters and gas flux. From the maximum efficiency of energy utilization of the whole system, the process parameters for optimum removal of TCE were obtained, i.e., 25 V in the input voltage, 500 Hz in the pulse frequency, 50% in the pulse duty ratio, 300 mL/min in the gas flux, and 5 mm in the discharge gap width. When the carrier gas included O ₂, the removal efficiency of TCE increased with an increase in the O ₂ content at low input voltage (<25 V) but decreased with an increase in the O ₂ content at high input voltage (>25 V). CHCl ₂COCl, CCl ₃-CN or ClCH ₂CH ₂NH ₂ were produced during the degradation of TCE, and the final products contained COCl ₂ as well as HCl, CO ₂ and CO.