Membrane gas separation is a financially significant and technologically critical component of the gas purification industry as it offers capital and operating cost advantages compared to other gas separation methods such as distillation, absorption, and adsorption. Many new polymer membrane materials have been proposed in recent years, but too often the cost of those materials and the inability to source commercial quantities prevent membrane manufacturers from developing new products. This project plans on addressing those drawbacks by introducing a new family of renewable, high-performance furanic-based polymers. Work in this project will focus on furanic-based polymer selection, hollow-fiber development, material characterization, and membrane testing for hydrogen recovery from mixed gas streams (e.g. H2/CO, H2/CO2, H2/N2/NH3) for commercial applications. Preliminary work on permeation tests has shown promising results, and the membrane separators have the potential to reduce capital costs by 10x, increase H2 recovery energy efficiency by 20% all while reducing the cost of separation by 20% and reducing waste by 20%.
The goal of this project is to provide a near term technology solution for the distributed generation of renewable hydrogen for fuel cell vehicle applications. This project will investigate a novel Caustic Aqueous Phase Electrochemical Reforming (CAPER) process on an oxigenated hydrocarbon, liquid ethanol in this instance, to make strides towards the DOE’s long-term cost target of $4/kg of hydrogen at the dispenser. The proposed CAPER technology utilizes liquid ethanol and electricity, preferably from intermittent renewable sources, to produce high purity (99.99%) hydrogen at high pressure directly from the reactor and without the use of precious metal catalysts. The CAPER technology also separates the produced CO2 from H2 in-situ by converting it to water-soluble HCO3-, leaving the gaseous hydrogen to bubble out of the caustic solution. The solution is then regenerated by removing high purity carbon dioxide from the solution that can be sequestered or reused.
