(370c) Solar Fuel Production from H2o/CO2 Via Zr-Doped Ceria Based Thermochemical Cycles

Worldwide human development increase with rise in population, which essentially depends on the large amount of the energy and power supply. Currently power generation in many industries (chemical, steel, automobile, and cement) largely depends on supply of fossil fuels like coal, light diesel oil, petrol. These ultimately emits large of CO₂ gas into the atmosphere and caused into upsurge into CO₂ level and accordingly 64% increase in global house effect and related climate changes. Such global warming potential affects the living life on the earth and extremely important to research towards CO₂ capture and conversion carbon neutral technology. In this paper, our focus was on developing carbon neutral and renewable technology to split H₂O/CO₂ into H₂/syngas via two step thermochemical redox cycle. Firstly CO₂ is captured by various methods and used for the two step (reduction and oxidation) thermochemical splitting of CO₂ into CO by using metal oxide as a redox materials. The CO generated can be mixed with the H₂ produced from thermochemical splitting of H₂O. The synthesis gas generated via such thermochemical redox reactions can be directly converted into liquid fuels via Fischer Tropsch process. In this study, investigation was focused to extend the thermochemical splitting capability of Zr-doped ceria. The ceria-zirconia oxides were prepared by using co-precipitation with aqueous ammonia as percipients. Dervied materials were characterized by using various methods. Finally, the redox performance towards thermal reduction (TR) and H₂O/CO₂ splitting reactions was estimated by conducting consecutive thermochemical redox cycles in the thermogravimetric setup (TGA). Also, a detailed solar reactor efficiency analysis will be conducted to estimate the solar-to-fuel energy conversion efficiency by using the real-time experimental data.