2.2. Experimental arrangement
The experiments are carried out in three different modes to study the energy consumption of the reforming process. In
mode 1, the mixture of CH4/CO2 is introduced into the graphite tube reactor only from inlet III, and there is no catalyst placed in reactor; in mode 2, the feed gases are kept the same as that in mode 1 except the 500 g commercial Z107 Ni/Al2O3 catalysts at the bottom of the reactor; in model 3, keeping 500 g commercial Z107 Ni/Al2O3 catalysts in the tube reactor, the mixture of CH4/CO2 is introduced from both of inlet II and inlet III. For all these experiments, the discharge power of the plasma is kept at 14.4 kW, and the Ar, N2, CH4 and CO2 are controlled by rotameters. The catalysts used in mode 2 and mode 3 are commercial Z107 Ni/Al2O3 catalysts with the components of NiO (14.50%), Al2O3 (w85.00%), SiO2 (0.20%) and Fe2O3 (0.35%), and the size is about 6e8 mm. The catalysts were not reduced before reactions. The products are analyzed by a gas chromatograph (GC) with thermal conductivity detector (TCD).