A review on direct methane conversion to methanol by dielectric barrier discharge

Manuscript id: 1839

Author response of the reviewer’s comments

Reviewer 1:

Question: 1) As this paper mentions about methanol, I suggest adding a very good paper in
introduction section written by a Nobel Laurent: Olah, G.A., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2005, 44,
2636-2639. This paper is giving a very good background on the methanol economy which can
be better than hydrogen.
Answer:
Thank you to the reviewer for his/her suggestion. In the revised manuscript, we added this
information. As currently there two very promising energy alternatives in the future, i.e.
methanol and hydrogen, this review paper will help the readers, experts, and scientists to mind
up their consideration. Thank you to the reviewer for the information.

Question: 2) It is well-known that direct methane partial oxidation to methanol is suffering

from a ‘thermodynamic hindrance’ for obtaining high yields production, even with plasma
method. Many researches tried to reduce this obstacle by speeding the reaction rate (i.e.
lowering the activation energy of intermediate species methanol) by adding catalyst for example
which has been proved obtaining good results (K. Aokia, M. Ohmae, T. Nanba, K. Takeishi, N.
Azuma, A. Ueno, H. Ohfune, H. Hayashi, Y. Udagawa, Direct conversion of methane into
methanol over MoO3/SiO2 catalyst in an excess amount of water vapor, Catalysis Today 45
(1998) 29-33). I hope there will be a little discussion about this part in the manuscript.
Answer:
Thank you very much for the suggestion. I agree with the idea of the reviewer that until now,
the application of direct methane conversion to methanol is not promising due to the low
production of methanol. As the thermodynamic terms seem not to favoring this reaction, some
manipulations of the original process are necessary, for example by the addition of catalyst.
Until now, only few papers about catalytic-plasma for methanol synthesis have been published.
Most of them showed very good selectivity of methanol but, in general, quite low in yield
values. The other problems are those papers did not mention clearly the detailed surface
mechanisms. Our research group currently published some paper related to the possible
mechanism of catalytic plasma process for methanol synthesis. We put this information and
discussion in the revised paper (section 2.7).
Question: 3) Another reference that author is suggested to take a look: Mair, et al., Chem. Eng.
J. 132 (2007) 85-95. Although this paper does not address the issue of methanol directly, it is a
useful for kinetic study of partial oxidation of methane in a plasma environment, especially
DBD.
Answer:
Thank you very much for the suggestion. Yes, previously we also have a look to this paper.
However, this paper is not too much focusing on the formation of methanol. The authors
performed a kinetic simulation, based on CHEMKIN software, with some arrangements of
reactions to access the presence of electron and ions. However, we added this reference in the
revised manuscript.

Reviewer 2:

Question: There are however some points in this study that would need of further correction
especially in the matter of linguistic, before the paper can be considered for publication in the
journal. Moreover, I can recommend acceptance of this manuscript. There is value in this
manuscript and no objection to seeing it published.
Answer:
Thank you for the suggestion regarding the language problem. In the revised manuscript, we
tried our best to solve and clean up the linguistic and grammatical problem. We hope it will
match the requirement to be a scientific paper. Thank you.

Thank you for the efforts made by the reviewers. The corrections have been done in the revised
manuscript and we marked it by using a ‘brown color’ to the sentences that are different from
the previous. Hopefully this will help the editor or reviewers to check the correction that we
have made.