Abstract
Hydrogen is widely regarded as a sustainable energy carrier with tremendous potential for low-carbon energy transition.Solar photovoltaic-driven water electrolysis(PV-E)is a clean and sustainable approach of hydrogen production,but with major barriers of high hydrogen production costs and limited capacity.Steam methane reforming(SMR),the state-of-the-art means of hydrogen production,has yet to over-come key obstacles of high reaction temperature and CO2 emission for sustainability.This work proposes a solar thermo-electrochemical SMR approach,in which solar-driven mid/low-temperature SMR is com-bined with electrochemical H2 separation and in-situ CO2 capture.The feasibility of this method is veri-fied experimentally,achieving an average methane conversion of 96.8％at a dramatically reduced reforming temperature of 400-500 ℃.The underlying mechanisms of this method are revealed by an experimentally calibrated model,which is further employed to predict its performance for thermo-electrochemical hydrogen production.Simulation results show that a net solar-to-H2 efficiency of 26.25％could be obtained at 500 ℃,which is over 11 percentage points higher than that of PV-E;the first-law thermodynamic efficiency reaches up to 63.27％correspondingly.The enhanced efficiency also leads to decreased fuel consumption and lower CO2 emission of the proposed solar-driven SMR system.Such complementary conversion of solar PV electricity,solar thermal energy,and low-carbon fuel pro-vides a synergistic and efficient means of sustainable H2 production with potentially long-term solar energy storage on a vast scale.
基金项目
Basic Science Center Program for Ordered Energy Conversion of the National Natural Science Foundation of China(51888103)
Joint Research Center for Multienergy Complementation and Conversion between the University,of Science and Technology of Chi()
NETL
NSTL
万方数据