Hot plasmas are better than cold plasmas for cracking ammonia for green hydrogen. This is what Antwerp researchers report in the Chemical Engineering Journal.

Ammonia is a potential carrier for storing green hydrogen. But if you want to extract the hydrogen from the ammonia, you have to crack it. This can be done thermally, but this goes against the sustainable idea of green hydrogen. Another option is plasma. ‘Cold plasmas are usually used for this’, explains Annemie Bogaerts, plasma professor at the University of Antwerp. ‘But in cold plasmas, the electrons have too much energy to dissociate ammonia efficiently.’ Bogaerts and her colleagues, Igor Fedirchyk, Ivan Tsonev and Rubén Quiroz Marnef, therefore decided to turn to hot plasmas (see box below), in part because not a great deal of research had been done on them.