Site items in: Content by Author Jason Ganley

Advanced Catalysts Development for Small, Distributed, Clean Haber-Bosch Reactors
Presentation

The traditional Haber-Bosch (HB) synthesis of anhydrous ammonia will adapt to clean power by sourcing the hydrogen from renewable electrolysis. However, the very large scale of current HB plant designs are not well-matched to smaller and more distributed clean power resources. Plant/reactor designs need to be made at a smaller scale in order to best utilize clean hydrogen. Small, megawatt scale HB reactors have an additional advantage of being better able ramp up and down with variable renewable power. This talk will detail ARPA-e funded work into the design and optimization of these smaller, clean NH3 reactors, which utilize much…

Fast-Ramping Reactor for CO2-Free NH3 Synthesis
Presentation

Starfire Energy is developing a fast-ramping reactor for making CO2-free NH3 for fuel, energy storage, and agricultural applications. A fast-ramping reactor is desired to follow (a) variable electricity generation from CO2-free sources such wind and solar power plants or (b) variable availability from CO2-free baseload electricity generation such as nuclear or hydroelectric power plants. The reactor builds upon the Haber-Bosch process by (a) introducing a higher activity supported Ru catalyst (over 4.5 mmol g-1 h-1 at 1 atm and over 45 mmol g-1 h-1 at 10 atm) and (b) further enhancing the catalysis by applying an electric potential or electric…

Applications of hydrogen permeable membranes in ammonia synthesis and decomposition
Presentation

It is well known that ammonia is being considered as a method of storing hydrogen. Although some fuel cells are being developed that can use ammonia directly as a fuel source, many fuel cell technologies still require an outside cracker to revert ammonia back into hydrogen for efficient use. In this regard, hydrogen permeable membranes, such as Pd and its alloys, have been targeted as potential membrane reactors in which the ammonia is cracked while the hydrogen is simultaneously separated. Pd and its alloys are expensive, but offer potentially perfect hydrogen purity that is highly preferable for certain fuel cells…

Presentation

Proton-conducting ceramics synthesized with solid-state reactive sintering are employed as electrolytes for the synthesis of ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen gases in electrolytic cells. Additionally, these cells function with excellent long-term stability and high efficiency when operated in galvanic (fuel cell) mode using ammonia fuel. Advances in electrolyte compositions and synthesis techniques are discussed alongside cell performance metrics.

Student Laboratory Module: Kinetics of Ammonia Cracking
Presentation

The Chemical and Biological Engineering (CBE) Department at the Colorado School of Mines is dedicated to the continual improvement of the laboratory resources made available to those undergraduates enrolled in courses which have major or minor laboratory components. One such course is Kinetics and Reaction Engineering (CBEN 418), offered to undergraduate seniors in the CBE department. Historically, this course has been delivered primarily as a series of traditional classroom lectures with an experimental module (usually one week at the end of the semester) with about 2 hours of participation time per student outside of normal class hours. Previous experimental designs…