Reduce, Reuse: NASA Recycles Hydrogen to Beat Bottled Water Blues

By: PRLog
Sustainable Innovations’ H2RENEW™ Hydrogen Recycling System Wins NASA Award for Critical Space Applications
PRLog - Oct. 23, 2014 - EAST HARTFORD, Conn. -- If you think high-end bottled water is expensive at the grocery store, you should try pricing it in space. In looking to possible future manned missions to the Moon and Mars, NASA today sets a premium on recycling the water (especially the hydrogen) already onboard its spacecraft. And with water shipping cost estimates running a million dollars per pound or more, it’s easy to see why.

So recently, NASA granted Sustainable Innovations a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Award for its H2RENEW™ hydrogen (and therefore water) recycling technology.

The first challenge in designing an onboard spacecraft gas recycling system is that molecular hydrogen is so small and lightweight, it’s hard to corral into even an impure stream. But then refining the gas stream so that it approaches 100% hydrogen with no impurities – and doing so using only a portable, lightweight and low-maintenance system – is especially difficult.

H2RENEW™ solves this problem via its proprietary electrochemical cell architecture -- one that can be used to separate and compress hydrogen in a single step quietly, efficiently and reliably.

H2RENEW™ has many attractive other applications on earth too, including heat treating of metals and semiconductor fabrication. Recent work has focused on purification of hydrogen reformed from natural gas, the primary source of hydrogen. Sustainable Innovations has developed an approach that allows operation of the electrochemical separation process on streams containing significant amounts of CO.  This is particularly important in hydrogen fueling applications, such as for fuel cell vehicles, since hydrogen must be separated from other natural gas reformate products in a manner that leaves it completely free of CO. Sustainable Innovations H2RENEW™ technology can remove CO and other contaminants and provide pure, compressed hydrogen.

According to Sustainable Innovations’ CEO Dr. Trent Molter, “The work done under this NASA Phase I SBIR will further demonstrate H2RENEW™’s ability to separate and compress hydrogen from a mixed stream containing significant proportions of CO along with other reactive gases including methane, acetylene, ethane, and ethylene.   The project will advance electrochemical hydrogen separation and compression technology for NASA’s space, industrial process hydrogen, and hydrogen fueling applications.”

About Sustainable Innovations:

Sustainable Innovations is developing products for critical energy and industrial applications having tremendous global commercial and societal value. At the core of its technology is Sustainable Innovations’ patent-pending, high-pressure electrochemical module which enables its products to generate and compress hydrogen, efficiently store energy from renewable resources, and sequester carbon dioxide.

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