Research Projects

The focus on reducing greenhouse gases has led to increased interest in hydrogen as a potential energy source for decarbonizing the energy sector. While fossil fuels are the most mature and cost-effective technology for hydrogen production, they are not sustainable. Renewable energy-integrated hydrogen generation technologies are needed to produce hydrogen at a large scale. Biomass, a promising renewable energy resource, can be used to produce hydrogen efficiently using chemical looping technologies. The fermentation process for ethanol production is well-established in India, and initiatives like the construction of 2G ethanol biorefinery plants can augment green hydrogen production from ethanol. However, significant research is needed to commercialize chemical looping technologies for green hydrogen production from ethanol, particularly in addressing challenges such as reactor configuration, hydrogen yield, CO₂ separation, coke conversion, and cyclic stability of metal oxides. This project aims to develop a three-reactor chemical looping water splitting (CLWs) configuration for co-production of syngas and pure hydrogen using low-cost metal oxides. The design has the advantage that all exit streams have product value, and the complete oxidation of oxygen carriers in the air reactor will have a synergic effect on syngas and hydrogen yield in the reformer and steam reactors. The project also aims to synthesize nanofibrous composite oxygen carriers with high cyclic stability, oxygen-carrying capacity, catalytic activity, and coke conversion, evaluate their performance in the CLWs atmosphere, and develop an energically, exergitically, and environmentally optimized layout of the ethanol-based CLWs process configuration for large-scale green hydrogen production using AsPEN PLUs.