Atmospheric Pressure Plasma for Diesel Particulate Matter Treatment: A Review

Abstract

The purification of diesel exhaust gas is of great importance to prevent the atmospheric emission of major pollutants such as diesel particulate matter and nitrogen oxides and meet the environmental regulations. The atmospheric-pressure plasma is attracting increasing interest and is a promising after-treatment technology for purifying diesel emission at low temperatures. However, when compared with the numerous publications on nitrogen oxides reduction by non-thermal plasma, using non-thermal plasma to particulate matter treatment have relatively limited. This work provides a comprehensive review of the plasma applications for diesel particulate matter treatment, including self-regenerating diesel particulate filter, diesel particulate matter removal, and simultaneous removal of diesel particulate matter and nitrogen oxides. The treatment of particulate matter from both simulated particulate matter sources and actual diesel engines also discussed in this comprehensive review. The challenge to this technology is limited energy consumption for plasma, which should be less than 5% (~30 J/L) of the overall fuel consumption. Until now, the atmospheric-pressure plasma has been no commercial implementation in diesel exhaust gas treatment, so more research is needed to be done in this field.