Effect of anode depth to produce nitrate through plasma electrolysis with air injection in Na₂SO₄solution

Nitrogen is the most important substance in fertilizer to produce high quality harvest. Nitrogen, which comes from the air, can formed as ammonia and nitrate in fertilizer. In industry, the most common fertilizer contain ammonia not nitrate because of its production process easiness compared to nitrate. Ammonia has fertilization efficiency 40% and nitrate has fertilization efficiency 60%. Industrial fertilizer production process nowadays, ammonia synthesis which called Haber-Bosch process, still not environmental friendly and also consume high energy. Environmental friendly and lower energy process is needed to produce fertilizer. Some study related to nitrogen fixation to produce fertilizer has been made including plasma electrolysis method. Plasma electrolysis is an effective method to fix nitrogen from the air because of its ability to produce OH radicals and other radicals to break the N2 bound to produce nitrate with lower energy consumption compared to Haber-Bosch process. This method is implemented in batch reactor with variation of anode depth. This study has proven can produce nitrate up to 1,200 ppm in condition power 800 watt, anode depth 1.5-3.5 cm and Na2SO4 electrolyte concentration 0.02 M.