(587e) Hydrogen Production From Bio-Ethanol in Dense Mixed-Conducting Oxide Membrane Reactor

The development of renewable energy source is of worldwide interest, due to the escalating energy crisis and energy related pollution problem. Among various options, hydrogen (H₂) has been recognized as an ideal energy for its high efficiency in fuel cell. It is extremely clean and does not produce air pollutants and greenhouse gas. In order to support sustainable H₂ economy, it is highly desired to produce H₂ cleanly and renewably. Water is clean, abundant, and renewable, therefore an ideal H₂ source. Bioethanol, a mixture of water and ethanol, is also considered as an attractive feedstock for H₂ production.

Recently, much work has been done in the mixed ionic and electronic conducting membrane for H₂ production, such as direct thermochemical water splitting (WS) ^[1] and the oxidative steam reforming of ethanol (OSRE) ^[2]. But for these reactions, the former was at the cost of H_2, which was used to the permeate side to consume the permeated oxygen; the latter showed poor performance possibly due to the unoptimized conditions.

In this work, a novel coupling reaction process is proposed, which combines WS with OSRE in a membrane reactor. A thin tubular SrCo_0.4Fe_0.5Zr_0.1O_3-d (SCFZ) membrane was used. In this reactor, the water splitting took place at the tube side of the membrane and the oxidative steam reforming of ethanol occurred at the shell side simultaneously. At 750°C, the hydrogen production rate of the shell side and the tube side are 6.8 and 1.8 ml (STP)·min^-1·cm^-2 respectively. For this process, only water and ethanol are used as feedstock and H₂ produced at both sides of the membrane is a real clean fuel. Our work demonstrated a high-effective sustainable process for hydrogen production from ethanol and water in a tubular SCFZ membrane reactor.

Acknowledgements This work was financially supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2009CB623406); National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 20990222, No. 21006047) and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 201003581).

References

[1] U. Balachandran, T. H. Lee, S. Wang, S. E. Dorris, Int. J. Hydrogen Energ., 2004, 29, 291.

[2] C. Y. Park, T. H. Lee, S. E. Dorris, U. Balachandran, Int. J. Hydrogen Energ., 2010, 35, 4103.