Freight transportation forms the basis of today’s globally distributed supply chains, and long-haul trucking is a core and critical link in this complex system. To meet climate goals around the world, it is necessary to develop decarbonized solutions to replace diesel powertrains, but given the huge and integral role of trucking, these solutions must be both economically feasible and practical. While hydrogen-based alternatives have the potential to be a promising decarbonization strategy as alternatives to diesel, hydrogen has significant limitations for transportation and refueling.
These obstacles, coupled with hydrogen’s compelling decarbonization potential, prompted an MIT research team led by William H. Green, Hoyt H. Green Professor of Chemical Engineering, to explore a way to transport and store hydrogen using liquid organic hydrogen carriers. cost-effective method (LOHC). The team is developing a disruptive technology that will allow LOHCs to not only deliver hydrogen to trucks but also store it on board.
Their findings were recently published in energy and fuelA peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society, published a paper titled “Perspectives on Decarbonizing Long-Haul Trucks Using On-Board Dehydrogenation of Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carriers.” The MIT team was led by Green and included graduate students Sayandeep Biswas and Kariana Moreno Sader. Their research is supported by the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC) through its Seed Award program and MathWorks, and is tied to work in MCSC’s Difficult Transportation Modes focus area.
“On board” approach
Currently, LOHCs operate within existing retail fuel distribution infrastructure to deliver hydrogen to refueling stations where it is compressed and delivered to trucks equipped with hydrogen fuel cells or internal combustion engines.
“Current methods incur significant energy losses due to the release and compression of endothermic hydrogen at the retail station,” Green said. “To address this issue, our work is exploring a more efficient application of LOHC-powered trucks with on-board dehydrogenation capabilities.”
To achieve such a design, the team aimed to modify the truck’s powertrain (the system inside a vehicle that generates energy to propel it forward) to allow onboard hydrogen to be released from the LOHC, using waste heat from the engine exhaust to “dehydrogenate” “Provide motivation. ” process.
dehydrogenation The process occurs inside a high-temperature reactor that continuously receives hydrogen-rich LOHC from a fuel storage tank. The hydrogen released from the reactor is fed to the engine after passing through a separator to remove any residual LOHC. On its way to the engine, some of the hydrogen is diverted to the combustor to heat the reactor, which helps enhance the reactor heat provided by the engine exhaust.
Acknowledge and address hydrogen’s shortcomings
The team’s paper highlights the shortcomings of current use of hydrogen, including LOHC systems, to decarbonize the trucking industry. No matter how the technology improves, these existing options will remain prohibitively expensive due to the high cost of retail hydrogen delivery.
“We have proposed an alternative that solves many of the challenges and appears to be a viable way to use hydrogen in this transportation environment,” said Biswas, who works in this area. “There are clear benefits for long-distance transport when using hydrogen via LOHC, such as scalability and fast refueling times. There is also huge potential to improve delivery and refueling to further reduce costs, which our system is working towards.”
“Utilizing hydrogen is an option that is available globally and can be expanded to countries like the country I am from,” said Moreno Sadr from Colombia. “Because it synergizes with existing infrastructure, So no big upfront investment is required. The global applicability is huge.”
Moreno Sader is a MathWorks researcher and, along with other members of the team, has been using MATLAB tools to develop models and simulations for this work.
Different industries come together
Decarbonizing transportation modes, including long-haul trucking, requires expertise and perspectives from different industries, an approach that resonates with MCSC’s mission.
The team’s groundbreaking research into LOHC-powered trucking is one of several projects supported by MCSC within its Hard Transportation Modes focus area and is led by postdoctoral impact researcher Danika MacDonell. Projects supported by MCSC were selected to address a range of socially significant and industry-relevant challenges to decarbonizing heavy transport, spanning a range of industries and solution pathways. For example, other projects focus on the logistics optimization of electric truck fleets, or the air quality and climate impacts of ammonia-powered transport.
MCSC is committed to supporting and amplifying the impact of these projects through collaboration between research teams and industry partners from a variety of fields. In addition, MCSC takes a collective multi-sector approach to decarbonizing transport by promoting shared learning between different projects through regular cross-team discussions.
Green-led research celebrates this cross-industry theme by combining industry-leading computational tools provided by MathWorks with cutting-edge developments in chemical engineering and industry-leading commercial LOHC reactor demonstrations to build cost-effective and convincing Vision. LOHC powered trucking.
Reviews and studies conducted energy and fuel This paper lays the foundation for further research into LOHC-driven truck design. Developing a vehicle with such a power-dense, efficient and robust on-board hydrogen release system required dedicated research and further optimization of core components specifically for trucking applications.