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Elucidating the process of hydrogen generation from the reaction of sodium hydroxide solution and ferrosilicon

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-04-25, 13:59 authored by Paul Brack, Sandie DannSandie Dann, Upul Wijayantha-Kahagala-Gamage, Paul L. Adcock, Simon E. Foster
For the first time, the process of hydrogen evolution from ferrosilicon 75 using sodium hydroxide solution has been investigated as a function of temperature using a combination of X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction and physical measurements. Ferrosilicon 75, a mixture of silicon (~50wt.%) and iron disilicide (~50wt.%), has been shown to produce hydrogen by the action of sodium hydroxide solution on the silicon only, with the iron disilicide acting in the role of spectator/protector species for the silicon. Neither iron disilicide alone nor ferrosilicon 45, which does not contain a pure metallic silicon phase, was found to generate hydrogen under similar reaction conditions, further indicating that the presence of a pure metallic silicon phase is essential for hydrogen generation. As the iron disilicide acts as a diluent for the active silicon, it is hypothesized that this would result in a slower release of hydrogen than that which would be obtained from the reaction of silicon alone, which may be useful for applications which require a long-term, sustained release of hydrogen. A hydrogen yield of 462.5mL/g and a maximum hydrogen generation rate of 83mL/min g were obtained within 10min of reaction with 40wt.% NaOH at 348K.

Funding

The authors would like to thank the EPSRC and Intelligent Energy for funding this project.

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Chemistry

Published in

International Journal of Energy Research

Citation

BRACK, P. ...et al., 2017. Elucidating the process of hydrogen generation from the reaction of sodium hydroxide solution and ferrosilicon. International Journal of Energy Research, 41 (12), pp. 1740–1748.

Publisher

© The Authors. Published by Wiley.

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-02-17

Publication date

2017

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Wiley under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

ISSN

1099-114X

Language

  • en