Electro-membrane Processes for the Green Hydrogen Production

Abstract

Since the last century, humanity has been facing challenging scenarios, like global warming, environmental pollution and the dramatic increase in energy demand. In this framework, green hydrogen has been identified as the most promising energy vector to achieve carbon neutrality. With this respect, the idea of the present work is to combine the Reverse Electrodialysis (RED) membrane process with hydrogen production. Experimental RED tests were carried out by feeding the unit with different concentrated solutions to study the process performance. Collected results suggest that this approach is a viable way to produce hydrogen with high faradic efficiencies, up to a maximum of 99 %, highlighting also the technology advantage of producing hydrogen by exploiting the salinity gradient energy, thus leading to a production with Specific Energy Consumption close to zero.