A new, real-time optical technique for analysing impurities in hydrogen gas production

Chromacity Ltd. reports on developing a next-generation optical solution for detecting contaminants in renewable hydrogen.

While renewable hydrogen is widely acknowledged to play a growing role in decarbonising the economy, challenges remain to control its purity. With supply from various sources, including green, blue, and re-gasified hydrogen from storage media, users need confidence that the gas they use is of sufficient quality not to damage key components such as fuel cells or infrastructure.

Working with Herriot Watt University and Fraunhofer UK, the solution combines high-brightness and Chromacity’s coherent Optical Parametric Oscillator (OPO) laser technology with advanced FTIR spectroscopy techniques, which offers several advantages over conventional technologies. ISO 14687:2019, which specifies the minimum quality characteristics of hydrogen fuel as distributed for utilisation in vehicular and stationary applications, is being used to benchmark this exciting new development.

Julian Hayes, CEO of Chromacity Ltd commented “Existing optical solutions for determining the purity of renewable hydrogen either compromise on spectral resolution and detection sensitivity or are overly complex making them expensive which limits deployment. Likewise, the implementation of sensitive gas chromatography techniques is limited because the instrumentation is costly, bulky, and online sampling is challenging.”

Mr Hayes added, “Based on a single light source, our solution removes the complexities of multi-source optical techniques, and so lowers the cost of ownership. The broad, tuneable bandwidth of the OPO laser allows many contaminants to be detected, including broad or complex chemical signatures. Our instrument is designed to be used in-line and has been shown to monitor the five key contaminants in the renewable hydrogen production process (as detailed in ISO 14687) in real-time”.