At first sight, the parabolic dish looks like any other telecommunications infrastructure. But the one on the EPFL campus is one of its kind - it doubles up as an artificial tree. A reactor above the dish uses sunlight to convert water into renewable hydrogen, oxygen, and heat.
The dish concentrates the sun's rays, after which water is pumped into its focus spot, which has an integrated photoelectrochemical reactor. Within this reactor, photoelectrochemical cells utilize solar energy to electrolyze or split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. Now, heat is also generated, but it is passed through a heat exchanger, thereby allowing it to be harnessed instead o released it as a system loss."Oxygen is often perceived as a waste product, but in this case, it can also be harnessed – for example for medical applications," Haussener said.
The system is already being used commercially. LRESE-spinoff SoHHytec SA is working with a Swiss-based metal production facility to build a demonstration plant at the multi-100-kilowatt scale that will produce hydrogen for "metal annealing processes, oxygen for nearby hospitals, and heat for the factory’s hot-water needs".and provide residential and commercial central heating.
According to the release, the EPFL campus system can power around 1.5 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles driving an average annual distance; or meet up to half the electricity demand and more than half of the annual heat demand of a typical four-person Swiss household at an output level of about half a kilogram of solar hydrogen per day.The production of synthetic fuels and chemicals from solar energy and abundant reagents offers a promising pathway to a sustainable fuel economy and chemical industry.
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