Edinburgh start-up Chromacity shares particulars of the event of a next-generation optical answer for the detection of contaminants in renewable hydrogen.
Whereas renewable hydrogen is broadly acknowledged to play a rising function in decarbonising the financial system, challenges stay to regulate its purity. With provide from various sources together with inexperienced, blue and regasified hydrogen from storage media, customers want confidence that the fuel they use is of adequate high quality that it’s going to not harm key parts reminiscent of gas cells or infrastructure.
Working in partnership with the Herriot Watt College* and Frauhofer UK*, a brand new answer combining excessive brightness, coherent Optical Parametric Oscillator (OPO) laser expertise from Chromacity, with superior FTIR spectroscopy strategies, has been proven to supply benefits over present applied sciences. ISO 14687:2019, which defines thresholds for a variety of contaminants in hydrogen for gas cells, is getting used to benchmark this thrilling improvement.
Julian Hayes, CEO of Chromacity Ltd commented: “Existing optical solutions for determining the purity of renewable hydrogen either compromise on spectral resolution and detection sensitivity or are overly complex making them expensive which limits deployment. Likewise, the implementation of sensitive gas chromatography techniques is limited because the instrumentation is costly, bulky, and online sampling is challenging.”
He added: “Based on a single light source, our solution removes the complexities of multi-source optical techniques and so lowers the cost of ownership. The broad, tuneable bandwidth of the OPO laser allows many contaminants to be detected, including broad or complex chemical signatures. Our instrument is designed to be used in-line and has been shown to monitor the five key contaminants in the renewable hydrogen production process (as detailed in ISO 14687) in real time”.
Mr Hayes concluded “Having been successfully tested in the lab on representative gas samples, the next stage of developing the system is to enable users to use live real-time data to drive optimisation of the production process.”
For additional data contact Chromacity on +44-131-449-4308, or e-mail sales@chromacitylasers.com.
*This improvement venture acquired funding from Scottish Authorities Rising Vitality Applied sciences Fund (EETF) – see https://www.gov.scot/publications/emerging-energy-technologies-fund-hydrogen-innovation-scheme-successful-projects/
