Direct Production of High Pressure Hydrogen at Great Rate from Glycerol/Water/Metal Mixture

Abstract

One of the key issues facing the global society today is to find renewable and sustainable energy sources. Hydrogen has gained much attention in recent years since it is one of fuels for fuel cells. It emits no carbon dioxide when it is used and so on. In this study, a great rate production of high pressure hydrogen rich gas from glycerol/water/metal mixtures was developed since glycerol has become one of the enormous industrial by-products, especially from biodiesel processing plants. It was found that cobalt was the optimum metal additive among tested metals of aluminum, cobalt, magnesium and nickel in terms of a hydrogen producing rate, a hydrogen partial pressure and a conversion ratio from 50 mol% glycerol/water mixtures under an operating temperature of 723 K. Concretely, hydrogen rich gas with concentration about 64% H 2 and high partial pressure about 4 MPa N,H 2 could be produced at the great producing rate of 42.9 L N,H 2 dm -2 min -1 and high conversion ratio about 60% H 2 . All the produced hydrogen rich gases from glycerol/water/metal mixtures were by no means inferior to pure hydrogen as a fuel for the polymer elec-trolyte fuel cell.