Hydrogen Generation through Cuprous Chloride-Hydrochloric Acid Electrolysis

Abstract

Due to fast industrialization the consumption as well as the cost of fossil fuels like petrol, diesel etc in the world is rising enormously leading to the generation of greenhouse gases like carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide etc besides decreasing the availability of the above fuels. The emission of these greenhouse gases rises the globe’s temperature leading the earth to face many dangerous complications. In order to save the earth from effect of rise of temperature and also to have an eco-friendly alternate energy fuel especially for the transport sector, attention is being focused on the generation of hydrogen gas which meets the above situations. During the combustion of hydrogen gas it emits only the beneficial water vapour to the atmosphere. In this research paper investigation has been carried out through CuCl-HCl electrolysis with 1M CuCl anolyte and 6M HCl catholyte for the generation of hydrogen gas at 70oC at normal atmospheric pressure employing a double compartment electrolytic cell having a nafion cation exchange membrane-324. Anode was graphite and cathode was 0.30 mg cm-2 platinum coated graphite. At a current density of 250 A m-2 the current efficiency for the oxidation of CuCl to CuCl2 and the formation of hydrogen gas was nearly 100% and the rate of hydrogen liberation was found to be 2 l h-1. Voltage efficiency and energy consumption values are calculated and are found to be more encouraging since they are more economical with less energy operation. The formed CuCl2 was reduced back to CuCl anolyte by chemical reduction with copper powder in 6M HCl at 70oC and the regenerated CuCl anolyte was again used in the CuCl-HCl electrolysis.