A team of researchers from CoorsTek Membrane Sciences and SINTEF in Norway, and Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain, has demonstrated a 36-cell well-balanced proton ceramic reactor stack enabled by a new interconnect that achieves complete conversion of methane with more than 99% recovery to pressurized hydrogen, leaving a concentrated stream of carbon dioxide. The team has also demonstrated that the process can be scaled up for commercial application.
A paper on the work is published in the journal Science.
Proton ceramic electrochemical reactors can extract pure hydrogen from gas mixtures by electrolytically pumping protons across the membrane at 800 °C. However, as the extraction proceeds, temperature gradients and entropic effects lead to efficiency drops. The new nickel-based glass-ceramic composite interconnect allowed for the design of a more complex…