Development studies on thermochemical cycles for hydrogen production

The experimental work in the field of the development of cycles of the Fe/Cl family is described. It appeared that application of a homogeneous support material for the gas-solids reaction was not feasible due to unexpected side reactions.The hydrolysis of ferrous chloride has been found to give good results and the development and operation of a continuously operating bench-scale reactor for this reaction has been described.The chlorination of the resulting magnetite could not be performed according to the originally proposed scheme. A satisfactory alternative has been found, i.e. chlorination at 150–200C with only hydrogen chloride and introduction of the reverse Deacon reaction as a fourth reaction in the cycle.