As one of the promising techniques for the abatement of Volatile organic compounds (VOCs), non-thermal plasma (NTP) technique has been attracting close attention recently due to its low temperature, convenient start-up and shutdown procedures, its low-cost, and being applicable to a wide range of VOCs. The synergetic positive effect between plasma and catalysis would be a key to improve the efficiency and decrease the energy consumption. Honeycomb monolith catalyst gives lower pressure drop across the reactor compared with the packed-bed reactor. However, the generation of plasma might be suppressed by the separated channel walls between the two electrodes. In this sense, the monolithic catalyst with designed pore structure might solve this problem.
In this work, we tried to use foam-like monolithic catalyst which might combine both the advantages of low pressure drop and plasma generation due to the open pore structure, and, therefore, it would be worthwhile to be investigated. We introduced copper foam as a monolithic support in a dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) non-thermal plasma reactor for the oxidation of toluene. The shape of copper foam could be tailored to the desired cylindrical form to fit the DBD reactor. One dimensional CuO nanowires and Mn-Co compounds were facilely in-situ grown on the surface of the copper skeleton as active components, through a heating process and a followed dip-coating process. The abatement of toluene was applied to evaluate the performance of such a monolithic copper foam in the combined plasma–catalytic process. In addition, material extrusion additive manufacturing is also being applied to design different porous structures for VOC abatement via NTP.