Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, Vol.48, No.19, 8985-8998, 2009
Method for Evaluation of Thermochemical and Hybrid Water-Splitting Cycles
This paper presents a methodology for the preliminary evaluation of thermochemical and hybrid water-splitting cycles based on efficiency. Because the method does not incorporate Sufficient flowsheet details, the efficiencies are upper bounds of the real efficiencies. Nonetheless, they provide sufficient information to warrant comparison with existing well-studied cycles, supporting the decision to disregard them when the bound is too low or continuing their Study. In addition, we add features not present in previous works: equilibrium conversions as well as excess reactants ire considered. The degrees of freedom of each cycle (temperatures, pressures, and excess reactants) were also considered, and these values were varied to optimize the cycle efficiency. Ten cycles arc used to illustrate the method.