A team at MIT has devised a system they say will make clean hydrogen from the heat of sunlight instead of electrolysis.
designed to speed access to clean hydrogen. Advocates say we can split water into its components — hydrogen and oxygen — by passing a strong electrical current through it. They’re right. That process does work, but it requires enormous amounts of electricity to produce hydrogen in large quantities.
The MIT research team says its latest design could be the breakthrough they have been searching for. Using their new reactor train, they estimate up to 40% of the sun’s heat could be harnessed to generate hydrogen. That increase in efficiency would drive down the system’s overall cost and make STCH a potentially scalable, affordable option to help decarbonize various industries.
The MIT researchers say their system, which resembles a train of box-shaped reactors running on a circular track, will optimize the process. In practice, the track would be set around a solar thermal source, such as a CSP tower. Each reactor would first pass through a hot station where it would be exposed to the sun’s heat at temperatures of up to 1,500 degrees Celsius. This extreme heat would effectively pull oxygen out of a the metal inside each reactor.
Second, they added a another set of reactors that circle around the first train, moving in the opposite direction. This outer train of reactors operates at cooler temperatures and is used to evacuate oxygen from the hotter inner train without the need for energy-hungry mechanical pumps. Both reactor trains run continuously to generate separate streams of pure hydrogen and oxygen.
“If this can be realized, it could drastically change our energy future by enabling hydrogen production, 24/7,” says Christopher Muhich, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at Arizona State University, who was not involved in the research. “The ability to make hydrogen is the linchpin to producing liquid fuels from sunlight.”
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