Green hydrogen from bio-ethanol reforming using micro plasma

Abstract

Hydrogen is a kind of energy source with a characteristic of high calorific value and plasma is regarded as a good method of hydrogen production. Hydrogen produced from ethanol reforming using micro plasma can be utilized for portable applications. The study introduces water/carbon ratio, residence time, and ethanol mass flow rate as the parameters of experimental conditions, and makes ethanol conversion, gas production rate, gas product selectivity, energy consumption, and efficiency of hydrogen production per unit as the evaluation parameters of ethanol reforming reaction. The experimental results showed that (1) in the argon micro plasma: the maximum ethanol conversion of 25.3% was obtained at residence time = 2.1 ms, ethanol mass flow rate = 0.01 g/s and S/C = 1.0, and the peak value of hydrogen production of 18.7 μmol/s was achieved at residence time = 2.1 ms, ethanol mass flow rate = 0.05 g/s and S/C = 1.0; (2) in the air micro plasma: the maximum ethanol conversion of 37.4% was obtained at residence time = 2.1 ms, ethanol mass flow rate = 0.01 g/s and S/C = 1.0, and the peak value of hydrogen production of 36.8 μmol/s was achieved at residence time = 2.1 ms, ethanol mass flow rate = 0.03 g/s and S/C = 3.0. These experimental results showed that the microreactor can substantially reduce the volume of the device while producing a large amount of output.