Showing posts with label School of Engineering at EPFL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label School of Engineering at EPFL. Show all posts

Monday, April 24

Turning Solar Power Into Hydrogen Fuel

 

  • Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology broke through the 1-kilowatt ceiling of green hydrogen generation using solar energy.
  • The system turns solar power into hydrogen, oxygen, and heat.
  • The lab wants to find new ways to use solar to create useful energy sources.

Researchers in Switzerland took a promising lab experiment and scaled it into a real-world example of how we could use solar energy to produce green hydrogen. Their system broke the coveted 1-kilowatt ceiling for green hydrogen production, and offers a new commercialization opportunity.

This efficient convertor of solar energy to fuel functions as an efficient artificial photosynthesis system, according to a new study by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) published in Nature Energy. It also produces useful byproducts of oxygen and heat.

“This is the first system-level demonstration of solar hydrogen generation,” Sophia Haussener, head of the Laboratory of Renewable Energy Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering at EPFL, says in a news release

“Unlike typical lab-scale demonstrations, it includes all auxiliary devices and components, so it gives us a better idea of the energy efficiency you can expect once you consider the complete system, and not just the device itself.”

To make it all happen, a system that looks like a satellite dish has been engineered to act like a tree. The 23-foot-diameter dish concentrates the sun’s radiation power nearly 1,000 times. 

When water is piped into the system, a connected reactor uses photoelectrochemical cells powered by that concentrated solar radiation to split the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. 

The process—dubbed artificial photosynthesis—also generates heat, which can move through a heat exchanger to reach a useful finished state.  READ MORE...