R.A. Potyrailo
GE Vernova Advanced Research Center,
United States
Keywords: hydrogen gas leak, sensor, part-per-billion sensitivity, environmental impact, economic impact
Summary:
For decades, hydrogen has been utilized in many industrial applications including agricultural, chemical, and petroleum refining industries. For hydrogen safety in these and other applications, diverse types of hydrogen sensors have been developed with their needed part-per-million detection sensitivity. At present, in addition to common industrial hydrogen uses, hydrogen has the potential to be a clean energy source for industry and transportation. To facilitate hydrogen adoption, in addition to safety, environmental and economic aspects should be considered. Hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas that extends the lifetime of greenhouse gases methane and ozone. While the current global hydrogen production is ~100 million tons/year, by 2050, the hydrogen production is estimated to reach 520 million tons/year. While relatively small hydrogen leaks may not cause immediate safety risks, on the global economy-wide scale, minor leaks will have environmental and economic impact – by having a noticeable contribution to global warming and up to a $59 billion per year value loss of hydrogen (assuming $2/kg of hydrogen). Thus, more sensitive hydrogen sensors with part-per-billion sensitivity are needed to detect even minor leaks and to reduce their environmental and economic impact. Our team is developing such high-fidelity gas sensing technology for prognostics of diverse assets of hydrogen infrastructure and for localization and quantifications of hydrogen gas emissions. In this talk, we will describe our sensing technology that is based on the multi-frequency dielectric excitation of semiconducting sensing materials. The mathematics of this sensing technology provides a multiparameter (multivariable) sensor response and makes these sensors first-order analytical devices. We developed a theoretical basis and experimentally demonstrated several innovative performance attributes that were previously missed when a resistance (zero-order) readout was applied for gas sensing with semiconducting sensing materials. We will show that tunable detection sensitivity of our hydrogen sensors allows detection down to 5 ppb levels of hydrogen on top of a 600-ppb environmental background of hydrogen in ambient atmosphere. Further, our developed multi-frequency detection provides immunity to diverse environmental effects such as fluctuations of ambient temperature and relative humidity and rejects effects of environmental chemical clutter. As a part of our ARPA-E project, we are implementing these sensors for localization and quantifications of hydrogen gas emissions from diverse assets for Green Hydrogen production, storage, and distribution. Our goals are to develop our leak-localization capability to differentiate and rank multiple leaks. The cost-effective and simple deployment of our hydrogen leak monitors with their 5-ppb detection sensitivity will support the evaluation of hydrogen sites over diverse geographic locations and climate conditions to ensure safe, environmentally sound, and economic growth of the hydrogen industry.