Portable Micro-Reactor- Producing Hydrogen From Fossil Fuels

For everyday use, we are trying to find an easier option for power supply.  Students at Chemical Engineering Department in Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey have developed a micro-reactor that uses fossil fuels for power generation. These students have developed reactors that can convert propane and butane present in fossil fuels to pure hydrogen as fuel foe cell batteries.

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Besides that hydrogen is a good target explosive  and that is why U.S Army is so much interested in technology that is reliable and safe in use. But  there are some side-effects  too. The  disadvantages of general methods by which hydrogen is produced:

• Scientifically the process of production of hydrogen  is quite tedious. Theses methods uses high temperature and vacuum conditions just to produce the plasma. This plasma is needed for chemical reaction to produce hydrogen molecule.
• Again the main difficulty in such method is of storage of hydrogen that is once produced. Hydrogen basically is highly volatile. It makes it expensive for transportation.

The students inventing this new micro-reactors had taken care of all these side-effects. This reactor is so designed that it works on low temperatures and almost at atmospheric pressure. Also the reactor has no problem storage as the production is done whenever needed and wherever needed as it is portable.

The reactor is made up of the  micro fabrication techniques. This  technology is now-a-days used in plasma TV screen. This has made production of plasma at the normal room temperature.

The team has made a successful achievement by producing hydrogen from methanol. Our daily fossil fuels consist of  butane , Methane iso-propane molecules which on certain chemical reactions give hydrogen molecules.  Firstly the methanol is gasified  and it is put in hot nitrogen gas for suspension. Then the mixture is flown through 25 µm pipeline to the micro-reactor. In micro-reactor it gets react with the plasma already present. This causes thermal decomposition and breaking of methanol into hydrogen.

The Stevens team is now trying to find out several compositions possible to produce  from different fuels. This will give soldiers to convert everyday liquid fuels like butane into hydrogen as portable fuel at their military camps , at any place whenever needed just to charge cell batteries.