Non-thermal plasma treatment of VOC mixtures in air and potential applications to the waste sector

A dielectric barrier discharge reactor was applied to a mixture containing VOCs, in order to obtain preliminary results on the possible application of Non-Thermal Plasma (NTP) to the gaseous effluents originated from mechanical-biologial treatments (MBTs) of solid waste. Removal efficiencies higher than 95% were obtained for all the VOCs initially present in the mixture. The formation of byproducts can be limited by increasing the energy applied to the discharge. The preliminary results obtained suggest that NTP could be favorably employed as a pre-treatment before the conventional biofilters or biotrickling filters adopted in MBTs, since NTP would be able to overcome some limitations of biological systems (e.g., sensitivity to variations of concentrations or flow rate and low removal efficiencies with lowly polar compounds).