Wei Zhang’s research while affiliated with Western University and other places

Non thermal plasmas created by dielectric barrier discharge can break down methane directly to constituent elements without carbon dioxide emissions to produce a high-purity hydrogen and byproduct of solid carbon. To fulfill the environmental promise of plasma generators they must be powered with sustainable energy sources such as solar photovoltaic (PV) systems. There is a need to overcome the limitations of past approaches to power plasma systems to develop a completely open source solar PV system design capable of providing the necessary high-quality power. To overcome this research gap, this article provides a customizable open-source PV-powered design for plasma generators, which allows off-grid operation. This design facilitates the modification of existing lab-grade plasma generator setups into portable solar-powered systems. The open source inverter provides for AC loads at both 120 V and 230 V and has an acceptable total harmonic distortion of 3.58 %. The system was successfully able to power plasma generation and produce high quality plasmas with methane. Plasma generators are highly sensitive to any input voltage variation and power oscillation and the open source system provided higher power applied to the plasma reactor, which resulted in increased CH4 conversion by 60.5 % and H2 production 44.7 % compared to grid supply.