Evolution of Industrial Ozone Generation

A vast selection of different ozone generator designs is commercially available on today’s market. In large-scale applications, the ground electrode is designed as gas/water tube heat exchanger, which is filled with tubular high-voltage electrodes on the gas processing side. Available constructions differ in diameter, length and arrangement of the tubular electrodes, type and support of the dielectric material and in the character of the applied microdischarges. Narrowest tolerances of the discharge gap and dielectric layer guarantee a uniformly distributed filamentary DBD plasma pattern along the ozone generator tube and therefore a homogeneously feed gas processing. Goal of the presented work is to explore the benefits from an inhomogeneous feed gas processing. A finite element model is utilized to simulate an inhomogeneous power induction along the ozone generator tube. The simulation yields the local power density, the local gas temperature gradient and a relative DBD packing density. Combined with experimental data, a sufficient set of information can be obtained to infer a strong correlation between electrode arrangement and generator characteristics. Therefore, several arrangements, evenly distributed within a given space, were designed, simulated, manufactured and tested on a representative scale. An arrangement with pronounced power induction at the generator inlet manifests several advantages over homogeneous plasma processing arrangements. The degree of filamentation turns out to be decisive, indicating a new potential trough plasma tailoring. 2 Increased robustness and substantial savings in electrical consumption were obtained on an industrial scale with more than one hundred square meters of active DBD area.