A workforce of MIT researchers led by William H. Inexperienced, the Hoyt Hottel Professor in Chemical Engineering, is growing a expertise that enables liquid natural hydrogen carriers (LOHCs) not solely to ship hydrogen to the vans, but in addition to retailer the hydrogen onboard.
Their findings had been lately revealed within the ACS journal Vitality and Fuels.
Presently, LOHCs, which work inside current retail gasoline distribution infrastructure, are used to ship hydrogen gasoline to refueling stations, the place it’s then compressed and delivered onto vans geared up with hydrogen gasoline cell or combustion engines.
This present strategy incurs vital power loss as a result of endothermic hydrogen launch and compression on the retail station. To deal with this, our work is exploring a extra environment friendly software, with LOHC-powered vans that includes onboard dehydrogenation.
—Prof Inexperienced
To implement such a design, the workforce goals to change the truck’s powertrain to permit onboard hydrogen launch from the LOHCs, utilizing waste warmth from the engine exhaust to energy the dehydrogenation course of.
Proposed course of stream diagram for onboard dehydrogenation. Element sizes are to not scale and have been enlarged for illustrative functions.
Picture courtesy of the Inexperienced Group.
The dehydrogenation course of occurs inside a high-temperature reactor, which frequently receives hydrogen-rich LOHCs from the gasoline storage tank. Hydrogen launched from the reactor is fed to the engine, after passing by means of a separator to take away any lingering LOHC. On its strategy to the engine, a number of the hydrogen will get diverted to a burner to warmth the reactor, which helps to reinforce the reactor heating supplied by the engine exhaust gases.
The workforce’s paper underscores that present makes use of of hydrogen, together with LOHC techniques, to decarbonize the trucking sector have drawbacks. No matter technical enhancements, these current choices stay prohibitively costly as a result of excessive price of retail hydrogen supply.
We current another possibility that addresses lots of the challenges and appears to be a viable approach by which hydrogen can be utilized on this transportation context. Hydrogen, when used by means of LOHCs, has clear advantages for long-hauling, akin to scalability and quick refueling time. There may be additionally an infinite potential to enhance supply and refueling to additional scale back price, and our system is working to do this.
—Sayandeep Biswas, first writer
Assets
Sayandeep Biswas, Kariana Moreno Sader, and William H. Inexperienced (2023) “Perspective on Decarbonizing Lengthy-Haul Vehicles Utilizing Onboard Dehydrogenation of Liquid Natural Hydrogen Carriers” Vitality & Fuels doi: 10.1021/acs.energyfuels.3c01919