Electrochemical Flue Gas Purification: A Review

In this article, different techniques for the removal of pollutants from diesel exhaust gasses using an all-solid-state electrochemical reactor are reviewed. Different concepts have been suggested in the literature, and on the background of this, advantages and drawbacks of electrochemical flue gas purification are outlined in the review. Early research has focused mainly on the removal of either hydrocarbons or nitrogen oxides (NOx). For the latter, a very high current consumption has been stated in the literature. More recent research has shown that one type of electrochemical reactors can remove all pollutants from diesel exhaust gasses. However, the power consumption is still too high at present for the technology to be a feasible (around twice that of State-Of-the-Art (S-O-A) Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR), which is around 1-2% of the total fuel consumption [1]). Also one concept has shown the ability to remove both hydrocarbons and NOx without the use of noble metals.