Abstract
Abstract. A miniaturized field-applicable sensor system was developed for the measurement of hydrogen (H2) in air in the concentration range 0.2–200 ppmv. The sensor system is based on the application of an yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) solid electrolyte cell (SEC) as a coulometric detector with gas chromatographic (GC) pre-separation. The main system components for injection, chromatographic separation, and the oxygen pumping cell were significantly miniaturized and tested separately to characterize important measurement properties like selectivity, lower limit of detection, repeatability, and signal-to-noise ratio. Measurements were conducted under varying GC parameters and detector operating conditions. While changing the detector temperature influences the hydrogen peak significantly due to diffusion processes at the electrode–electrolyte interface; different oxygen-partial pressures at the measuring electrode have no visible effect. The combination of two packed columns with 1 m length, one filled with a molecular sieve (13X) and the other one with silica gel, enabled highly reproducible and selective H2 measurements with more than 90 % analyte turnover compared to Faraday's law. The resulting insights were used to define appropriate system parameters, construction guidelines, and material properties for the final test prototype.
Highlights
Two of the largest challenges for a sustainable energy infrastructure of the future are its supply security and its renewability
The results indicate that the area and height of the H2-related peaks decrease with increasing detector temperature
Since the amount of hydrogen titrated during peak tailing is a part of the injected quantity that is incompletely taken into account during peak integration because of the upcoming oxygen peak, the peak areas and heights are lower with prolonged tailing
Summary
Two of the largest challenges for a sustainable energy infrastructure of the future are its supply security and its renewability. There has been significant development in the use of H2 to supply energy in different sectors, e.g. through fuel cells (Mohapatra and Tripathy, 2018; Sinigaglia et al, 2017), and on the other hand, technologies have been developed to produce H2 using renewable sources (e.g. power to gas; Hosseini and Wahid, 2016; Maroufmashat and Fowler, 2017). A decentralization of the H2-based energy supply chain will affect the consumer sector, prospectively to a far greater extent than today, which will result in new challenges in application security. Since H2 is a very light, highly flammable, and odourless gas with a wide explosion range in air, a widely accepted approach to risk management is its automated, highly selective online measurement in a wide concentration range down to concentrations below 10 vol.-ppm, so that any leak can be detected at an early stage (Hübert et al, 2014)
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