Dielectric barrier discharge plasma catalysis for CO2 conversion: Recent progress and perspectives

In recent years, dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma-catalytic technology has emerged as a promising approach for CO₂ conversion due to its unique ability to activate inert molecules under mild conditions. This review systematically summarizes recent advances in DBD plasma-assisted catalytic processes for CO₂ utilization, focusing on four major technologies: CO₂ methanation, dry reforming of methane (DRM), CO₂ hydrogenation to methanol, and the reverse water-gas shift (RWGS) reaction. This review provides a comprehensive examination of DBD plasma-catalytic CO₂ conversion, with particular focus on process parameters, reaction mechanisms, and catalyst design strategies. The analysis highlights the crucial plasma-catalyst synergy, where non-equilibrium electron excitation from DBD plasma facilitates CO₂ dissociation while precisely engineered catalyst properties, including oxygen vacancies, tailor metal-support interactions, and direct the subsequent conversion pathways. These interdependent effects collectively determine their activity, selectivity, and stability. Additional emphasis is placed on plasma-assisted catalyst synthesis techniques and innovative approaches to mitigate carbon deposition, offering insights into the development of more efficient and durable catalytic systems for CO₂ conversion. This review affirms the technical viability and promising prospects of plasma-catalytic CO₂ conversion while acknowledging critical challenges in energy efficiency and product selectivity. To accelerate industrial translation, future research should focus on unraveling plasma-catalyst interactions through coupled in situ characterization and computational modeling, establishing fundamental structure-performance relationships under dynamic reaction conditions, and engineering scalable reactor systems that maintain catalytic integrity during continuous operation.