Solar-Thermochemical Hydrogen

Solar fuels are not just a good idea, they are an immediate reality, and hydrogen is going to lead the transition.  It is becoming more and more apparent that the key barrier to market penetration of hydrogen and PEM fuel cells is the clean, cheap, large-scale, and renewable production of hydrogen.  Herein lies the most pressing question - how to effectively tackle these issues all at once.  Solar thermal hydrogen stands out as the most promising candidate for the job, and as is being demonstrated in Europe, its process efficiency, scalability, sustainability and carbon-free nature cannot be denied any longer.  While at the tail-end of a movement that is sweeping through the EU, we are still well positioned to contribute to the field and help usher the technology into the United States.  Designing, developing and demonstrating a laboratory scale solar-thermal reactor is a sure-footed first step in bringing the age of solar fuels to the US.

Continuing with design and modeling of our thermochemical reactor, the optimization process has made much head way.  Fluent CFD software has proven to be a valuable tool, and we hope to have our reactor design complete and ready for construction in the very near future.  Design choices are based on reactor efficiency, which is essentially related to the effectiveness of the reactor in delivering and distributing highly concentrate sunlight to the reactants.  There are many parameters to consider, some with more obvious effects than others.  Indeed, modeling will be crucial to every stage of the project, even once the reactor has been built and tested, but for now we are drawing near the end of our preliminary modeling considerations.  What we face next is of a more practical importance, and it will be no trivial task to translate the simple lines of our computer model into the shapes and curves of steel, ceramic tiles, bricks of insulation, and quartz windows that will be accepting 10kW of concentrated sunlight.  

Figure 1.  Simple cavity solar-thermal reactor

Figure 2.  Modeling of one design parameter