Design project is OVER!!!

Phewwww. Alhamdulillah... The design project was over. Though I was not completely satisfied with my own performance throughout the process development, at least everything was now over and i'm left with individual enhanced design project next year to be worried of.

Our project was about hydrogen production using thermochemical cycle. The chosen cycle was copper-chlorine's that were used as intermediates to split water into oxygen and hydrogen gas. It consisted of 4 steps i.e. Hydrolysis, oxygen production, low temperature electrolysis, and hydrogen production running below 600 degree celcius with thermal efficiency exceeding 40%.

I was responsible to design a hydrogen purifier, i.e. To separate hydrogen from hydrogen chloride gas and also other impurities. At first, I insisted to carry on designing an adsorber column due to the small percentage of hydrogen chloride contained in the stream. However, post designing hydrogen production reactor found that excess hydrogen chloride was used to ensure complete reaction in the tank. Therefore adsorption technique could no longer be feasible as huge amount of adsorbent would be needed to separate almost 90mol% hydrogen chloride containing stream.

A wet scrubber which used absoprtion technique should now be used to separate a water soluble hydrogen chloride gas from hydrogen. It was found that the product stream coming out from the hydrogen production reactor contained around 5kg/h of copper chloride liquid. However, it would solidify after being cooled and separated using a cyclone that used density difference to separate between components.

I expected a question from the examiner during the presentation. However, as I told everything above to the presenter, I saw the examiner scrubbing off the meant question and did not even asked me. I did not speak a lot during the question and answer session as none of the question was related to my part of knowledge in the design. The only thing I spoke was 1.2mol%.

I hope Allah will give the best mark for us for the design project and let me to proceed MEng in September. Amin...