Residual Heat Recovery for Hydrogen and Oxygen Production

The residual heat recovery for hydrogen (H<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf>) and oxygen (O<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf>) production is an interesting and promising opportunity to capture and store a thermal energy that would otherwise be eliminated, recycling it into a readily usable and transportable energy carrier and an important element for various industrial processes. This paper presents a lumped dynamic model based on an equivalent electric circuit to simulate the recovery of residual heat produced by an oven using solid-state thermoelectric generators (TEG) to power a Polymer Electrolyte Membrane (PEM) electrolyzer stack for H<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> and O<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> production. The simulation results considering a direct TEG-electrolyzer connection are in agreement with the expected theoretical behavior related in literature and demonstrate the feasibility of this proposal.