Produce green hydrogen with solar panels to investigate its compression, transportation, storage and use. This is what the Hydrogen Laboratory and the green hydrogen production pilot plant that the Polytechnic University of Catalonia has just inaugurated on the Diagonal-Besòs Campus seek. It is a leading scientific facility in Europe that wants to help find the necessary solutions so that companies and industries can generalize the production and use of this energy vector that aims to be key in the energy transition.
Between research and the market
The laboratory has been in operation for a few months, it has ten research groups and has already begun to work with important companies that use equipment for testing real situations based on their needs. With strong confidentiality restrictions regarding these advances, the company QEC can be named, which develops cutting-edge technology in electric mobility. They are, generally, companies that need a lot of energy to work and need to do research to innovate in processes and components. In these beginnings, the laboratory mainly serves Catalan companies, but the international dimension of the research is already important. For this reason, not many days ago, a delegation from the German region of Waden-Gutenberg visited the laboratory to open avenues for collaboration.
For Luís Soler, deputy director of the Specific Center for Recarca de l'Hydrogen (CER-H2) of which the equipment is part, the most important thing is that the laboratory “contributes to filling the valley of death”, that is, it helps to complete “the journey” between fundamental research and going to market. This makes it easier for both a more basic result in a process and a specific product to end up reaching the market. About thirty research people work in the laboratory, but also industrial doctoral students, who are, in reality, teaching and research staff in the training phase.
From 24 solar panels to 100 kW in extreme conditions
One of the challenges of this laboratory is to investigate and look for alternatives to fossil fuels to generate energy. This is made from green hydrogen, it is hydrogen that has been produced with renewable energy. The equipment has 24 solar panels installed on the roof. They have an initial capacity to produce more than 13 kW, 5 kW of electrical power for the laboratory microgrid through fuel and 6kg through daily hydrogen production. The storage capacity is 17 kg of hydrogen at 300 bars of pressure.
"Competitiveness is one of the key factors to advance the use of hydrogen - explains Attila Husar, director of the laboratory -, the current price of the generation of hydrogen use is five or six euros and we need this cost to be between two and three euros to be able to successfully reach the hydrogen market.” The CER-H2 team of researchers already has innovative projects underway to develop new liquid hydrogen storage systems, transforming it into synthetic liquid fuels, such as zero-emission fuel for aircraft or creating bimetallic catalysts for the production of green and blue hydrogen. . They design hydrogen cells for hybrid vehicles or intelligent hydrogen combustion systems to decarbonize the glass, cement, steel and ceramics industries....
There are very few facilities in Europe that have the possibility of testing the entire green hydrogen production process in real conditions,” Husar specifies, “the Diagonal-Besòs Campus laboratory constitutes a true living lab of great value for companies.”
