[Image above] Credit:alec boreham; Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
It’s the first and lightest element in the Periodic Table and the most abundant chemical in the universe. An atom of hydrogen contains just one proton and one electron—and that could be all that’s needed to cleanly power our future.
来自Coorstek膜科学（Golden，Colo）的科学家团队，奥斯陆大学（挪威）和化学技术研究所（西班牙）开发了一个有希望的新型陶瓷膜，可以降低成本并提高氢的可行性一代足以将技术带到清洁能源解决方案的最前沿。
由钡，锆和钇和钇的氧化物制成的新型陶瓷膜 - 可以以一步法的一步法将氢与天然气的效率较高。掺入质子陶瓷燃料电池中，膜可以产生高纯度压缩的氢，仅使用天然气和电力。该团队最近发表了它的成果自然能量。
“By combining an endothermic chemical reaction with an electrically operated gas separation membrane, we can create energy conversions with near zero energy loss”, Jose Serra, co-author of the paper and professor at the Institute of Chemical Technology, says in aCoorsTek press release。
The membrane consists of a dense film of a BaZrO3.-based proton-conducting electrolyte on a porous nickel composite electrode, a combination that has high proton conductivity at 400ºC–900ºC—allowing it to separate primarily hydrogen protons out of methane, the primary component of natural gas, with incredibly high efficiency.
According to thepaper’s abstract那the scientists report that the membrane removes 99% of formed hydrogen from methane at 800ºC.
用于质子陶瓷燃料电池的一个可能有希望的应用是电力低发射车辆。天然气是如此丰富，低成本，分离过程如此效率，陶瓷膜可以使氢气成为燃料的最佳选择，在排放和成本方面燃料。
“我们的突破性陶瓷膜技术使氢气燃料车辆具有较高的能量效率，与电池电动车辆相比，电池电动车辆与来自电网充电的电池电动车辆，”每个Vertre，Coorstek Memberane Sciences董事总经理新闻稿。
According to a CoorsTek infographic, the ceramic membrane could allow overall hydrogen production efficiency for fuel cell vehicles of 41%, whereas fuel cell vehicles that rely on water electrolysis to generate hydrogen have an overall efficiency of just 17%.
在整体效率方面，验收陶瓷氢燃料电池车辆不远的是电池电动车，估计总效率为37％。但质子陶瓷氢燃料电池车辆在较低的排放方面也优越，降低驾驶成本降低了20％，排放越来越高，驾驶成本低于电池电动车辆。
陶瓷膜可以提供更加巨大的改进，这些车辆在我们大多数人仍然开车，由内燃机引擎 - 质子陶瓷氢气燃料电池供电的那些发出65％的排放量，并且比由内燃机动力的车辆具有81％的驾驶成本。
Credit: CoorsTek
另外,能够轻松地生成压缩沪元drogen could enable compact hydrogen generating installations, helping solve the problem of lagging hydrogen infrastructure that currently limits adoption of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. While the infrastructure forelectric charging stations is more rapidly expanding那hydrogen fueling stations are few and far between. In fact, there are currently only3.9 in the entire U.S.（所有这些都位于该国的周边），尽管如此commercial availability of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles。
“The potential for this technology also goes well beyond lowering the cost and environmental impact of fueling motor vehicles,” Vestre adds in the release. “With high-volume CoorsTek engineered ceramic manufacturing capabilities, we can make ceramic membranes cost-competitive with traditional energy conversion technology for both industrial-scale and smaller-scale hydrogen production.”
小型氢气生产对于住宅用途非常适合，在那里这种质子陶瓷燃料电池可以与热水器类似地安装。由于美国使用天然气加热的61％的单一家庭住宅，许多家庭的装置可能相对简单。
科学家们报道了论文的摘要，即生产10千克H的小型氢气厂的建模2每天 - 估计典型的家庭每天仅需要0.4千克来为燃料电池电动车供电，例如 - 总效率超过87％。
该团队还表明，陶瓷膜也是在工业上可扩展的，甚至对于大量氢气产生电源应用，如氨基肥料的制造，氢气最大的工业工业应用，消耗量高达200-600吨每天氢气。
Potential applications for the ceramic membrane are likely to get creative as well. “When you have the technology to convert energy from one form to another with almost no loss of energy, this opens up new ways to think about energy systems,” Serra says in therelease。“For example, we can use the ceramic membrane technology to produce hydrogen from water. This will require more electric power than reforming of methane, but if electricity is available from renewable sources we can make hydrogen without CO2emissions. You can also think one step further and design energy systems that are not only low carbon or zero carbon, but even have negative carbon emissions. This will be the case if you use renewable electricity to reform biogas to hydrogen, and store the produced carbon from the biogas underground. In this way, hydrogen can one day become a negative emission energy carrier.”
本文发表在自然能量那is “Thermo-electrochemical production of compressed hydrogen from methane with near-zero energy loss” (DOI: 10.1038/s41560-017-0029-4).
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