Integration of Biohydrogen Purification System and Fuel Cell Application

Biohydrogen (bio-H2) has a large potential as an alternative and renewable energy in the future. However, there are a few constraints that need to be overcome such as CO_2 removal as one of the fuel impurities. For instance, in fuel cell system, if bio-H_2 is being used directly, it most likely will lead to low the performance and damage the fuel cell system. Thus, separation technologies are required to separate bio-H_2 from the CO_2 impurities, and hence produce H2 at high purity. In this study, the purification of bio-H_2 system; adsorption technique; was integrated with hydrogen fuel cell system. Therefore, a commercial mixed gas H_2/CO_2 50 vol%/ 50 vol% as mimic bio-H2 gas is used as feed gas with flow rate of 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, and 1.0 L min^-1 to produce the purified H_2 via adsorption technique. The purified H_2 from adsorber column’s outlet then was flowed into polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) to obtain the power generation. Meanwhile, the breakthrough profile and adsorption capacity was plotted and measured to analyze the adsorption technique performances. As a comparison, a commercial pure H_2 was used in order to compare the performance for both cases. From the results, the CO_2 adsorption capacities decreased with the increasing of feed gas flowrate. Simultaneously, the performance of PEMFC would decrease significantly more than 50% when the impurities of CO_2 exists in the adsorber column outlet. It was confirmed that the existence of CO_2 in the H_2 fuel with greatly decreased the PEMFC performance and results in unstable power generation. Therefore, an efficient purification system for bio-H_2 is required as part of integration unit in bio-H_2 application for power generation.