Research situation and progress of non-equilibrium plasma chemistry

Generally, the non-equilibrium plasma is produced at low pressure by a glow discharge (1.33 Pa-l.33 kPa)including the radio frequency (13.56 MHz), microwave (2450 MHz), AC or DC high voltage discharges. As a method to directly apply energy to a reaction system,some successful applications have been obtained in the fields such as chemical synthesis and decomposition at plasma, sputtering and filming, deposition at the gas state,polymerization, modification on the material surface,etching, ashing at low temperature and so on. For example,in 1999, Zhang et al.[1] got a high conversion rate of 98.2% for CH4 synthesis by a glow discharge at the condition of 850℃ with the catalyst of Ni/α-Al2O3. In 1990,Matsumoto et al.[2]