High Purity Hydrogen and Carbon Dioxide Separation with Electrochemical Pump Operation of HT-PBI Fuel Cell at 120°C

Abstract

A commercially available, polybenzimidazole (PBI) membrane based electrochemical hydrogen pump (EHP) platform was thoroughly evaluated to generate a benchmark set of performance. A primary gas mixture of CO2 and H2 with a ratio of 4:1 was selected to demonstrate the performance of EHPs while addressing concerns of CO2 poisoning effect. There is no indication of significant CO poisoning as a result of reverse water gas shift reaction (RWGS), and nearly Faradaic current efficiencies were successfully achieved. It was found that humidification of the feed gas at room temperature improved polarization performance while also improving energy efficiency, thus reducing the need for tightly controlled relative humidity of feed gas. A new perspective on EHP energy efficiency calculation methodology is also provided by inclusion of the cell heating requirement into the calculation. In this manner, an overall improvement to energy efficiency nearing 20% was realized by dropping the cell temperature to 120°C while paying no significant penalty to electrochemical performance. Nearly 99.99% pure H2 and 99.93% pure CO2 were produced with a hydrogen yield of 99.34%.