Date of Award

Spring 2023

Document Type

Thesis

Terms of Use

© 2023 Huiying Xiao and Thomas A. F. Dilts. This work is freely available courtesy of the author. It may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. For all other uses, please contact the copyright holder.

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Engineering Department

First Advisor

E. Carr Everbach

Abstract

A Seawater Photovoltaic-Hydrogen Generation System is developed with the goal to produce a safe, user friendly, cost effective, and realistically scaled hydrogen generation system using seawater, particularly for remote regions as well as storage alternatives for renewable energy. An iterative design process was implemented within three prototypes, the first primarily focused on proving the concept of electrolysis, the second to create a robust hydrogen generation system resistant to corrosion using forward osmosis, and the third to scale up our system while also aiming for safety, user friendliness, and cost effectiveness. In the final iteration of our project, an integrated three chamber acrylic tank was created using primarily forward osmosis technology, carbon electrodes, and a palladium tank. This system holds seawater in the first chamber, transfers pure water into the second for electrolysis, converts water into oxygen with electrical current from a PV system, then sends the hydrogen into a palladium tank. All three prototypes successfully yielded hydrogen from seawater. With additional improvements to make our design more mechanically robust, efficient, user friendly, and culturally accepted, this system could become a promising system that can be integrated within communities, particularly remote regions.

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