Thermal Plasma for Treating Process Liquors / Plasma thermique pour le traitement des liqueurs de procédés

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Although considered to be a boon to society in general, the industrial revolution of the past 2 centuries has also resulted in the gradual deterioration of our everyday environment. Many of the manufacturing processes in use today produce large emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) and require large energy inputs. As regulatory bodies continue to legislate for more stringent limits on the levels of GHG released into our environment, it is clear that more energy efficient technologies must be developed to clean process liquors before discharge or at least reduce the contaminants to acceptable minimum levels so that our industries can continue to be clean, yet maintain their economic competitiveness. One such promising technology has emerged from the ongoing plasma processing work of the Chemical Engineering and Biotechnological Engineering Dept. at the Université de Sherbrooke. Plasma is a physical state of materials whereby ordinary matter is converted, on vaporisation, to a mixture of electrons, ions and neutral particles on exposure to very high temperatures (in excess of 4000 °C), hence the generally used name, "thermal plasma". Thermal plasma can be most conveniently generated by gaseous ionisation, either between "powered" electrodes or by electro- magnetic field induction, by means of suitably powered coils. Advantages of such energy intensive process technology over conventional methods include increased energy use efficiency, significant reductions in GHG emissions and better control of the system chemistry performed in compact reactors. However, before these new thermal plasma technologies can be introduced and brought to commercial scale use, the underlying mechanisms of the reactions, observed between the plasma and process liquors, must be sufficiently understood In this five year study, we propose to investigate different reactive systems in order to understand fundamentals of the plasma's interaction with different surrogate liquors and the parameters that affect these interactions, and development of the plasma reactor itself.