Removal of dilute mixture of styrene and ammonia using corona discharge reactor at various temperatures

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to investigate the effect of temperature on styrene and/or ammonia removal using electron attachment reaction because the target gases are two of the malodorous gaseous components that emitted at high temperature from a crematory furnace. The corona-discharge characteristics at various elevated temperatures are studied first. Then the electron attachment reactor is applied to remove styrene(C8H8) and/or ammonia(NH3) from N2 at room temperature to 300 ํC. The factors investigated are inlet gas concentration of styrene, percentage of coexisting oxygen and the concentration of water vapor in the gas stream. Past and present experimental results that, regardless of the temperature, the lower the inlet concentration, the higher the removal efficiency becomes. It has been found that the presence of O2 enhances the removal efficiency of both styrene and/or ammonia. The presence of water vapor enhances the styrene removal efficiency from N2. However, the presence of water vapor in N2-O2(5%) has adverse effect on the removal efficiency. Furthermore, simultaneous removal of styrene and ammonia from N2 has been investigated. The experimental results show that the presence of styrene enhances the removal efficiency of ammonia. In contrast, the presence of ammonia slightly retards the removal efficiency of styrene. As expected, the presence of O2 enhances the simultaneous removal efficiency. Since some reaction by-products are often generated, using two independently operated reactors in series can satisfactorily minimize this problem.