Hydrogen based materials research
Event details
| Date | 04.05.2017 |
| Hour | 16:00 › 17:00 |
| Speaker |
Prof. Bernard Dam Materials for Conversion and Storage, Faculty of Applied Science, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
ChE-602 - Recent Events in Energy seminar series
Hydrogen is a vital element in the energy transition. While sustainable energy sources such as solar and wind plants will power the planet, this energy needs to be converted in chemical bonds to provide storage, fuel and resources to our future energy system. Hydrogen is the most simple chemical bond that can be made by electrochemistry. Given the materials involved in electrolysis and the intermittent nature of its use when powered by sustainable sources, the production cost of electrochemically produced hydrogen is far from competitive. In this talk I will discuss some of our efforts to produce hydrogen with various levels of integration with on the one hand solar PV sources and on the other hand battery storage. The integration of different functionalities is challenging but may lead to substantial cost reduction.
Apart from producing hydrogen, we also need ways to purify and detect it. Here, we make use of the optical changes in metals on hydrogenation. This allows us to develop optical fiber based hydrogen sensors. When using Hf as a detector, we obtain an extremely large sensing range covering 6 orders in hydrogen pressure. Finally, also the purification of hydrogen using metal hydride membranes still provides a challenge to our understanding of hydrogen transport. Using optical methods again, we find that the existence of heterogeneous fcc/hcp phase boundaries contributes to a large extent to the fast permeation observed in PdCu-based membranes.
Hydrogen is a vital element in the energy transition. While sustainable energy sources such as solar and wind plants will power the planet, this energy needs to be converted in chemical bonds to provide storage, fuel and resources to our future energy system. Hydrogen is the most simple chemical bond that can be made by electrochemistry. Given the materials involved in electrolysis and the intermittent nature of its use when powered by sustainable sources, the production cost of electrochemically produced hydrogen is far from competitive. In this talk I will discuss some of our efforts to produce hydrogen with various levels of integration with on the one hand solar PV sources and on the other hand battery storage. The integration of different functionalities is challenging but may lead to substantial cost reduction.
Apart from producing hydrogen, we also need ways to purify and detect it. Here, we make use of the optical changes in metals on hydrogenation. This allows us to develop optical fiber based hydrogen sensors. When using Hf as a detector, we obtain an extremely large sensing range covering 6 orders in hydrogen pressure. Finally, also the purification of hydrogen using metal hydride membranes still provides a challenge to our understanding of hydrogen transport. Using optical methods again, we find that the existence of heterogeneous fcc/hcp phase boundaries contributes to a large extent to the fast permeation observed in PdCu-based membranes.
Practical information
- General public
- Free