Iran Occupational Health

Abstract

Background and aims:Nowadays, the non-thermal plasma is considered as a successful new technology with high efficiency in the air pollution control and is in the focal attention of the researchers. Various types of atmospheric pollutants adversely influence on the human health and the environment regionally and globally. Carbon monoxide has been introduced as a critical pollutant which can cause the environmental and health effects. The growing concern about effects of air pollution on human health, and also more stringent strategies of choosing the air quality standards, have motivated the development of air pollution control techniques, particularly the non-thermal plasmas techniques. Therefore, the aim of this study is the removal of the carbon monoxide (CO) contaminants in the dry air and argon atmospheres in order to determine of the effective parameters.

Methods:The current study has determined the effects of temperature, the CO concentration, the voltage and the residence time on the CO elimination efficiency by ASTM D 5835  method in the both of systems, i.e. the system of negative plasma reactor (diluted by dry air) and the system of positive plasma reactor (diluted by argon gas), simultaneously.

Results:The results indicated that the temperature and the residence time did not have a significant effect on the CO removal in the both dry air and argon gas systems. However, the most important variable in the both systems was the voltage in the vicinity of 8 kilovolts with the p-value <0.05 and the mean effect of 37 and 13.2 in the dry air and argon gas systems, respectively.

Conclusion:The results of CO elimination in the dry air and argon atmosphere indicate that the dry air system, due to present of the Oxygen active ions, has better performance compare to the argon gas system.