Author response

HAZMAT-D-05-00574: Gliding Arc Plasma Processing of CO2 Conversion

Submitted to the Journal of Hazardous Materials

Reviewer 2
1. It is better some text to be added to Introduction section about environmental importance of
CO2 and why it should be removed
Answer:
Thank you for the suggestion. In the revised manuscript we put that information of the
importance of removing CO2 in the Introduction section.

2. What about the role of ‘wet test meter’, ‘H2O bath and its by-pass stream’ and ‘bubble flow
meter’ which are presented in the Fig. 1 but have not explained in experimental section?.
Answer:
Thank you for the suggestion. In the previous manuscript, those parts which are shown in
the Figure 1, were not explained yet. The function of wet test meter is used to measure the
fluctuation of flow rate because of volume expansion or compression due to reactions. It is
little bit different with the function of bubble flow meter which is used to check and measure
the flow rate goes only to gas chromatography (GC). As water vapor was one of the
auxiliary gases that we used in the experiment, we added water chamber and water vapor
was produce by bubbling method. All that information is already in the revised manuscript
which is also to answer the question from reviewer one about the clear explanation of Fig.
1.

3. What about plasma temperature?

Answer:
Thank you. To know about the temperature of plasma, especially gliding arc plasma is
interesting because in this experiment, the reaction temperature is also an important factor
for breaking the molecules bond of the toxic or object compounds. Gliding arc plasma is
classified as plasma transition between cold and thermal. Almost same with cold plasma,
the bulk temperature of plasma is similar to the room temperature or temperature of injected
gas. However, the arcs that are produced have much higher temperature because it
contains high density of electrons. It seem difficult to measure the temperature of single
moving arc because it moves and not homogeneous. Different from other non thermal
plasma where the electron distributed well inside the plasma region, in gliding arc, the
distribution of electron and other non-stable species is only occurred inside the arc. This can
 be a disadvantage but also can be an advantage. The electron will agglomerate in the
certain volume and can be very powerful to break the strong chemical bond. We tried to
measure the arc temperature by visible colour spectroscopy but it looks it was not correct.
We have to add high speed camera to capture single arc and until now there is no
instrument supported with this apparatus. Other difficulty of measuring temperature of arc is
during the movement along the electrodes, the arc temperature is change. For every
produced arc, it will have three transformations: breakdown, equilibrium, and non-
equilibrium (or breaking) phases. In each phase, the temperature will be different. One
paper tried to explain and measure the temperature of arc, which is around 5000K, but it is
not exact temperature. And also, the temperature of plasma depends so much on what
compounds and flow rates are on it. Anyway, because we don’t have enough supporting
scientific data about temperature, we do not want to put it in our manuscript.

4. Reference for equation 8 to 12?

Answer:
Thank you very much. We put the reference for the equation 8 to 12. It was calculated and
concluded based on our plasma kinetic simulation.

5. There are serious grammatical errors and hard-to-understand sentences, which should be
corrected
Answer:
Thank you for the correction and suggestion from the reviewer 2. The correction will be very
useful and we have asked one of our post-doctoral researcher (he is from America) in our
laboratory to check the spelling and grammar of the manuscript.

6. Journal name in ref. 9?

Answer:
Thank you for the correction. The journal name is vacuum.

We thank to the editor and reviewer for their concern to our manuscript. And still, we are
welcomed for every question on this manuscript to make it perfect.