Ammonia Synthesis by Radio Frequency Plasma Catalysis: Revealing the Underlying Mechanisms

By Javishk Shah, Weizong Wang, Annemie Bogaerts, M. Carreon. ACS Applied Energy Materials, 2018

156 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Nonthermal plasma is a promising alternative for ammonia synthesis at gentle conditions. Metal meshes of Fe, Cu, Pd, Ag, and Au were employed as catalysts in radio frequency plasma for ammonia synthesis. The energy yield for all these transition metal catalysts ranged between 0.12 and 0.19 g-NH3/kWh at 300 W and, thus, needs further improvement. In addition, a semimetal, pure gallium, was used for the first time as catalyst for ammonia synthesis, with energy yield of 0.22 g-NH3/kWh and with a maximum yield of ∼10% at 150 W. The emission spectra, as well as computer simulations, revealed hydrogen recombination as a primary governing parameter, which depends on the concentration or flux of H atoms in the plasma and on the catalyst surface. The simulations helped to elucidate the underlying mechanism, implicating the dominance of surface reactions and surface adsorbed species. The rate limiting step appears to be NH2 formation on the surface of the reactor wall and on the catalyst surface, which is different...

Subfields: Catalysis, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/61cdd7fa3ccbb0adcfe661ee7da05d2cb3e86165

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In Catalysis

1. X. Tu
2. Annemie Bogaerts

In Materials Chemistry

1. Annemie Bogaerts
2. X. Tu
3. J. Whitehead
4. Hyun‐Ha Kim
5. G. Centi
6. Anthony B. Murphy
7. E. Neyts

Citations in the corpus

• The 2020 plasma catalysis roadmap (2020, background): “This is despite the development of zero-dimensional kinetic models [104, 144] and detailed experimental investigations [145, 146], and may be at least partly due to the different plasma conditions and catalysts considered.”