Plasma-Activated Carbon Ore

The United States is rich in carbon ore, also known as coal, but concerns about global warming have caused a decline of its use for electrical power generation. There is interest in finding alternative higher value uses for this natural research that do not require its combustion at a scale of hundreds of millions of tons per year. Innovations in material properties require innovations in material processing. In this talk, I will report our preliminary experiments focused on understanding the material properties of coal exposed to nonequilibrium plasma, and compare that to coal that has been thermally processed under the same gas atmosphere. Preliminary experiments have revealed that processing the coal in a nonequilibrium nitrogen-hydrogen plasma produces a high specific surface area on the order 100 to 1000 m² per gram and this product is spontaneously combustible in an oxygen atmosphere, suggesting that the surface is highly active. Results from differential scanning calorimetry under an inert gas atmosphere will be presented to understand if the spontaneous combustion is related to an energetic metastable atomic configuration, for example on the surface, that is produced by plasma activation.