Plasma-driven catalysis: green ammonia synthesis with intermittent electricity

Abstract

Ammonia is one of the most produced chemicals, mainly synthesized from fossil fuels for fertilizer applications. Furthermore, ammonia may be one of the energy carriers of the future, when it...

Electrical and reaction performances of packed‐bed plasma reactors moderated with ferroelectric or dielectric materials

“…Effectively, several studies carried out by using BaTiO 3 and glass as moderator materials revealed that the former performs better, even at temperatures above its Curie point. [49][50][51] As ferroelectric materials may act as catalysts for the ammonia synthesis and other plasma-catalysis processes, [49,50,52,53] the higher NH 3 yield obtained with PZT could also be due to a higher catalytic activity of this material as compared with that of BaTiO 3 . In addition, the highest BaTiO 3 current in Figure 4a for the same temperature range than for the experiment in Figure 5 supports the idea that electron impact processes directly related to the decomposition of the ammonia molecule [54] are more probable for BaTiO 3 than for PZT and might contribute to the observed relative decrease in efficiency of the former.…”

“…Finally, we should mention that apart from the right moderator choice in terms of their dielectric properties, the incorporation of classical catalysts in packed-bed plasma reactors and the design of new ones are current challenges that will enable increasing the energy efficiency and yield of the processes to make them competitive regarding classical catalysis processes. [52,55]…”

Development of Electrocatalysts for Efficient Nitrogen Reduction Reaction under Ambient Condition

“…[ 1b ] Therefore, it is very urgent to search a clean and sustainable process for the production of ammonia. Many methods have been proposed for the purpose, such as, electroreduction of nitrate to ammonia, [ 6 ] electrochemical nitrogen reduction reaction (e‐NRR), [ 7 ] photocatalytic NRR, [ 8 ] plasma‐chemical NRR, [ 9 ] biochemical photocatalytic NRR, [ 10 ] and chemical looping NRR. [ 11 ]…”

Accessing Low-Valent Titanium CCC-NHC Complexes: Toward Nitrogen Fixation

“…Ammonia produced through ANF is utilized in multiple large-scale industries apart from fertilizers; examples include: pharmaceuticals, explosives, plastic manufacturing, mining and metallurgy, production of nitric acid, et cetera [8]. Recently there is an increasing interest in using ammonia as the energy carrier of the future [17,18]. Further increase in conventional ANF will be ecologically undesirable in terms of carbon footprint, therefore new environmentally-friendly methods for ANF are required [19].…”

“…Improving the efficiency of ANF will lead to huge benefits on a world-wide scale. Multiple approaches ( Figure 1) have been undertaken to achieve this including: improvement of the H-B process conditions by exploring biological-mimics, homogeneous or heterogeneous catalysts designed to operate at milder conditions, semiconductor-based photocatalysis for nitrogen fixation, greener microwave plasma methods to synthesize ammonia and NOx, and hybrid systems between NNF and ANF such as development of synthetic rhizospheres (SRS), which helps intensify the NNF in plants via the development of a synthetic media [1,17,18,[20][21][22][23]. Binding of dinitrogen to a metal center depends on the formation of a stable reduced metal center, which can in turn reduce a dinitrogen molecule.…”