The continuously increasing oil prices as well as stronger environmental regulations regarding greenhouse emissions made the greatest economic powers search a new, price competitive, and environment friendly energy carrier, such as hydrogen. The world research activities in these terms focus on the development of integrated hydrogen and power generating technologies, particularly technologies of hydrogen production from various carbonaceous resources, like methane, coal, biomass, or waste, often combined with carbon dioxide capture. In the paper the thermodynamic analysis of the enhancement of hydrogen production in iron based chemical looping process is presented. In this method, iron oxide is first reduced to iron with a reducing agent, such as carbon oxide, hydrogen, or mixture of both gases (synthesis gas), and then, in the inverse reaction with steam, it is regenerated to iron oxide, and pure stream of hydrogen is produced.
Solid iron based low or medium temperature chemical loop is considered as a possible option of hydrogen storage and production. In the method, hydrogen is produced via iron oxidation with steam, and in the next phase iron oxide is reduced with hydrogen, synthesis gas or methane. In the reduction stage the reaction is terminated when the atmosphere still contains a large fraction of the reducing agent (often over 70 vol.%). In the paper the innovative idea of a double, iron and germanium based, chemical cycle was proposed. The thermodynamic calculations show that the reduction stage in the double iron-germanium cycle is more effective than the classical iron based loop.
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