The Benefits of Small Quantities of Nitrogen in the Oxygen Feed to Ozone Generators

This paper reports the ozone generation in pulsed multichannel dielectric barrier discharge. The influence of nitrogen addition (0.1%–10%) on ozone concentration and ozone generation efficiency in nitrogen–oxygen gas mixtures is studied. Results show that adding 0.1% N₂ would not seriously increase the ozone production. Meanwhile, 1% N₂ content exhibits the highest ozone production efficiency in low SIE (J/L, defined as the ratio of power to gas flow rate) region (0–200 J/L) while adding 0.3% N₂ would lead to the highest ozone generation efficiency in high SIE region (300–800 J/L). The increase of ozone production induced by N₂ addition is more significant in low SIE region compared with that in high SIE region. At 100 J/L, ozone production efficiency increases 26.9% to 201.6 g/kWh with 1% N₂ addition when compared with that in oxygen. At 18 J/L, the observed maximum ozone generation efficiency reaches 252 g/kWh at 1.3 g/Nm³ with 1% N₂ addition. An increase of ozone production can be obtained with 0.3%–2% N₂ addition in all explored SIE ranges.