REVIEW PAPER Three-Phase AC Arc Plasma Systems: A Review Laurent Fulcheri 1 • Fre ´deric Fabry 1 • Sabri Takali 1 • Vandad Rohani 1 Received: 14 October 2014 / Accepted: 25 February 2015 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015 Abstract Most arc plasma systems are based on DC plasma technologies. However AC plasma systems can offer significant advantages versus DC plasma systems particularly in terms of efficiency, cost and reliability. They are also likely to overcome some of the limits of classical DC systems for some specific large scale high power applications. This paper presents a literature review of three-phase AC plasma systems which have been developed by the most active research groups on multi-phase AC plasma systems in the United States, Norway, Germany, Russia, France, and Japan for about 50 years. Keywords Three-phase AC plasma Á Electric arc Introduction In the current context of conventional fossil fuel depletion and global warming, plasma systems stand as one of the most promising technologies in many large scale industrial areas such as decontamination and waste treatment (household, medical, biological, toxic, or hazardous waste), energy (assisted combustion of Low Heat Value fuels, ignition, startup and assistance of coal power plants, pyrolysis, fossil cracking or gasification and/or renewable fuels), material processing (metal melting, reduction and recovery, particle densification, gas phase synthesis of nanoparticles, etc.). Typical advantages of plasma systems versus traditional technologies based on partial oxidation or combustion include the following: their ability to deliver and tune the enthalpy and/or temperature through an external energy supply with temperatures that cannot be achieved with combustion methods, their very short dynamic response, their limited & Laurent Fulcheri laurent.fulcheri@mines-paristech.fr 1 MINES ParisTech, PERSEE Centre ‘‘Proce ´de ´s, Energies Renouvelables et Syste `mes Energe ´tiques’’, PSL Research University, 1, rue Claude Daunesse, 06904 Sophia Antipolis, France 123 Plasma Chem Plasma Process DOI 10.1007/s11090-015-9619-8