Breakthrough in quest for cleaner energy production

www.gulf-times.com
12/4/2010

The prospects for cleaner energy has become brighter with a researcher at Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ) achieving a breakthrough in the production of hydrogen and carbon black from natural gas using a unique solar reactor. The work of TAMUQ's mechanical engineering assistant professor and Sustainable Energy Research Laboratory principal investigator, Dr Nesrin Ozalp, has already won the Excellence in Environmental Technology distinction from the Offshore Arabia 2010 Environmental Awards.

"We have done the simulations and successfully validated the findings in the lab, and now we are in the process of manufacturing (the reactor) and testing it in real weather conditions," Dr Ozalp told QF Radio's John Bullock in an interview, made exclusively available to Gulf Times. The researcher who has received many honours, was working at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology on cracking natural gas into hydrogen and carbon black, before joining TAMUQ.

"I had the chance to continue and further develop this technology at TAMUQ. Now my research is completely on developing a reactor that can produce hydrogen and carbon black without emitting CO2, regardless of the weather conditions," she explained. If other reactors, made elsewhere, face problems of carbon accumulation on the wall and clogging at the exit, Dr Ozalp's lab model overcomes them with minimised clogging at the exit and complete elimination of carbon particles on the wall. "Currently the research is at the lab scale, but it can be scaled up to industrial scale or to meet the demand of a city like Doha or New York," Dr Ozalp observed.

The salient feature of the solar reactor is an aperture, which she designed drawing inspiration from the human eye's pupil which shrinks and dilates in proportion to the light falling on it. "When the sky is very clear and sunshine is abundant, the opening of the aperture will be small, but when it is cloudy or if it is raining or there is a dust storm, the aperture would open up automatically so as to keep the temperature inside the reactor constant," she said.

Although it sounds very easy, the idea is highly complicated, Dr Ozalp cautioned by pointing out that it involves lots of changes in the fluid dynamics, heat transfer, and thermodynamics warranting a highly advanced control of the system. "But our results show very successful outcomes and we have published a lot on this technology in top journals, including the international journal of hydrogen energy and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers' journal of heat transfer," the researcher said. Dr Ozalp believes the technology she has developed at TAMUQ will be applied everywhere in the near future to produce not only hydrogen and carbon, but also electricity.

"Hydrogen can be used as a fuel in an internal combustion engine, like the ones used in vehicles, or in power generation instead of natural gas, or as a commodity, whereas carbon black carbon is needed to support the economic demands of the production of tyres, printer ink, pigments and plastics, among many applications," she said.

Dr Ozalp stated that by splitting natural gas into hydrogen and carbon three times, more revenue could be obtained, apart from replacing the current technology with a cleaner and greener solution that combats global warming. "Right now I have about 10 journal and conference papers on this technology and the results," said the researcher who has been invited to the US in May to give talks at Nasa Glenn Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio, and Stanford University's Department of Energy Resources Engineering.