Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC's) are a major source of such pollutants and have posed a serious problem to environment. Several industrial manufacturing systems produce and release these chemicals, through vents, as unused chemicals from pesticides, medicines and as organic sludge. Most of these chemicals are non-biodegradable in nature (refractory type organics). Hence Incineration (controlled combustion) is the only technique available for the destruction of such chemicals. The present study is desired to evaluate the performance of the incineration process under different operating conditions and to develop conditions for high destruction efficiencies at moderate conditions of temperature and pressure to reduce energy consumption as well as to reduce the formation of secondary air pollutants. Benzene has been taken as the representative example of such VOC's because of the fact that aromatics predominate the VOC's.

Series of experiments are carried out for the combustion of benzene in the reactor without packing media i.e., in an empty column, with alumina of 2mm spherical particles as the packing material up to a bed height of 3cms only. The combustion efficiency was recorded with varying bed temperature of the column in case of thermal incineration and catalytic incineration. It was observed that reaction temperature in thermal incineration is very high. To reduce the energy consumption for supplying the heat to attain desired temperature, its better to go for catalytic combustion.

The combustion of benzene was carried out in the reactor with different catalysts like 5% Cuo, 0.67% Rh, 0.1% Pt, 1% Pt-Rh and 1% Pt-Rh-CeO₂ on alumina as the packing material of bed height of 3cms. The combustion efficiency was determined at varying temperature of the column by keeping the air flow rate and the benzene flow rates constant. It was observed that the Pt-Rh-CeO₂ provided the best combustion efficiency compared to other catalysts. Combustion efficiency of 99% and more has been achieved at a temperature of 325^oC. It was also observed that catalyst was also active for long duration in comparison with other catalysts.