Plasma technologies: waste treatment applications

Overview

ABSTRACT

Since their advent, plasma technologies have allowed for the elimination of toxic military and industrial products, the treatment of contaminated solids, soil decontamination, etc. These techniques in full development are now used for the treatment of municipal waste. This article presents the current state of the development of thermal plasmas and provides a general information on plasma waste treatment. It concludes with an in-depth study of this technique for various types of waste: toxic liquids solids, metallurgic, etc.

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AUTHOR

Pierre FAUCHAIS: SPCTS – Axe 2 – UMR 6638 CNRS - Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Limoges

INTRODUCTION

In the field of waste treatment, after relatively incipient industrial beginnings in the 1980s, with work essentially limited to metallurgical dusts, plasma techniques began to find outlets in the 1990s in the destruction of toxic military and industrial products, the treatment of contaminated solids and low-activity nuclear waste, soil decontamination... Since the 2000s, this development has become exponential, particularly for municipal waste, as the synthesis gas produced is very interesting.

The advantages of thermal plasmas over conventional combustion techniques are as follows:

High temperatures (over 6,000 K) lead to reaction kinetics at least two orders of magnitude higher than those obtained in combustion;
the possibility of pyrolysis with an oxygen deficit (formation of CO instead of CO ₂ );
a percentage of available energy of almost 90% above 1,500 K, compared with 23% for flames;
much more compact reactors due to energy densities;
much lower gas flow rates (one to two orders of magnitude);
plasma start-up and shutdown times of the order of a few tens of seconds.