Engineers from the University of Colorado Boulder have devised a solar-thermal system that can be used to split water in order to produce clean hydrogen fuel.
With the new CU-Boulder method, the amount of hydrogen produced for fuel cells or for storage is entirely dependent on the amount of metal oxide — which is made up of a combination of iron, cobalt, aluminum and oxygen — and how much steam is introduced into the system. One of the designs proposed by the team is to build reactor tubes roughly a foot in diameter and several feet long, fill them with the metal oxide material and stack them on top of each other. A working system to produce a significant amount of hydrogen gas would require a number of the tall towers to gather concentrated sunlight from several acres of mirrors surrounding each tower.
C2B2 is an arm of the Colorado Energy Research Collaboratory involving CU-Boulder, the Colorado School of Mines, Colorado State University and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden. The collaboratory works with industry partners, public agencies and other institutions to commercialize renewable energy technologies, support economic growth in the state and nation and educate the future workforce.
For more information on the chemical and biological engineering department visit http://www.colorado.edu/chbe/. For more information on C2B2 visit http://www.c2b2web.org. For more information on the Biofrontiers Institute visit http://biofrontiers.colorado.edu.
9 Comments on "Engineers Develop Water Splitting Solar-Thermal System to Produce Hydrogen Fuel"
Oh yeah? With the steadily rapid increasing energy consumption on this planet – How many years until we have emptied 80% of our oceans? …. 200, 400, 1000. Then what? Emmigrate to the planet Mars?
The hydrogen would be used for fuel cells. Fuel cells create water as byproduct. Not sure how well that would offset the creation of the hydrogen.
Martin you are an idiot. Not sure why you are reading this article since you have such a minimal ability to comprehend what you are reading. Combustion of hydrogen fuel produces water, which can be split again into, you got it, more hydrogen fuel.
We never empty our ocean. Energy will be used and convert back to water vapor..
So many ways this is wrong. Do they pay people do post these things to confuse readers? Water–>Hydrogen–>Water means you never run out of water. Ever. Not a concern at all.
Oh, please, Tore, tell us you were being sarcastic.
The larger potential problem is that where there is lots of sun for a system like these, fresh water tends to be at a premium, so it probably has its limited areas where you could have high production of hydrogen with this system.
By itself, hydrogen is not a great fuel. It damages metal containers and rapidly dissipates in the air. BUT.. Add that hydrogen to a little carbon and you get the same nice fuels that we mostly get from fossil sources now. This is tech for after we run out of that.