LSU Chemical Engineering Team Researching New Production Method for Clean Hydrogen
October 3, 2024
BATON ROUGE, LA – A team of LSU Chemical Engineering researchers is exploring a cheaper, alternative means of producing “clean hydrogen,” and its doing it, in part, through the use of formate salts widely used in de-icing.
The chemical reaction that extracts hydrogen from formates is an extremely slow process at room temperature, but when combined with a catalyst—those commonly used in the chemical industry include platinum, palladium, and nickel, etc.—the reaction can be sped up. Palladium, in particular, with mild heating can cause the formates to release hydrogen when no other metals can.
The issue, however, is that palladium is rare and expensive. The goal of the LSU research team, therefore, is to discover a cheaper alternative catalyst for producing hydrogen under the same conditions as if it was using palladium.
“Hydrogen as a fuel for power generation, transportation, and heavy industries has several important advantages,” said Ye Xu, associate professor and lead researcher on the project. “In particular, ‘clean hydrogen’ is produced without fossil fuels and without greenhouse gas emissions. Our overall goal is to discover a cheaper alternative catalyst for producing clean hydrogen from formates.
“To accelerate the work, we plan to use computational methods to not only understand how this important reaction works but also to rapidly generate new catalyst candidates that will then be made using our advanced synthesis methods and tested to determine their overall performance at producing hydrogen.”
Because formate salts are safe, non-toxic, and easily transported, they make portable, on-demand hydrogen production technologies possible without needing highly-energized equipment that involves high pressure or temperatures or harmful emissions. And that is the second aim of this project, Xu said.
“We also plan to develop a small prototype reactor using advanced CAD (computer-aided design) and 3D-printing techniques that will be combined with the new catalyst to demonstrate continuous hydrogen generation from formate salts at mild conditions,” Xu added. “Hydrogen will be the ultimate fuel of the future to drive all chemical power-based technologies without producing harmful pollutions or emissions. To achieve that goal, the federal government, through agencies including the Department of Energy, has been investing significantly in hydrogen technology research.
“Our project highlights the success that sustained investments made by the State of Louisiana in building up the research capabilities and stature of LSU has begun to generate, which is putting Louisiana at the cutting edge of hydrogen research.”
Xu is joined on the project by Associate Professor Kunlun Ding, Associate Professor Kevin McPeak, and Professor William Shelton.
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