Achievement

A chemical engineering student, Ryan Andress, is working on hydrogen production and has seen some key advances due to interactions with groups outside the field of chemical engineering. The nuclear engineering community has helped plan the direction of research. These interactions aided in the completion of a systematic search algorithm for hydrogen production methods and the complete demonstration of a methodology on the well studied Fe-Cl system of thermochemical cycles. Through communications with government researchers and professors across disciplines at multiple institutions, they successfully posed a systems-based methodology to identify, screen, and evaluate alternative and hybrid alternative thermochemical cycles for the production of carbon-free hydrogen. With this formulation, complete sets of cycles (including new cycles) can be identified from non-linear thermodynamic databases, using integer linear and mixed integer linear mathematical programs.