Microwave heating can be used to promote heterogeneous reactions with carbon materials, mainly because of the heating mechanism involved in microwave radiation and the phenomenon known as microplasmas. This work presents photographic evidence of plasma formation when different carbon materials are subjected to microwave heating. Two different kinds of plasmas were observed: ball lightning and arc discharge plasmas. The intensity of the plasmas in the less ordered carbon was significantly higher at the beginning of the process.

Energy storage is a topic of great importance for the development of renewable energy, since it appears to be the only solution to the problem of intermittency of production, inherent to such technologies. In this paper, a new technology for energy storage, based on microwave-induced CO 2 gasification of carbon materials is proposed. The tests carried out in this study on different carbon materials showed that charcoal consumes the least amount of energy. Two microwave heating mechanisms, a single-mode oven and a multimode device, were evaluated with the latter proving itself to be the more efficient in terms of energy consumption and recovery. The initial results obtained showed that this technology is able to achieve energy efficiencies of 45% at laboratory scale with every indication that these results can be improved upon to make this approach highly competitive against other energy storage technologies.

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