The students of chemical engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology have discovered a microreactor, which can be used by the American soldiers for powering their battery.
The microreactor invented by them utilizes the exclusive properties of microscale systems to convert normal fossil fuels such as butane and propane into clean hydrogen to power the fuel cell batteries. The new batteries function efficiently and can be utilized for a number of years by just replenishing the fuel in the batteries with hydrogen.
Microreactor Senior Design Team 2011
The single-use batteries utilized by the army are of considerable weight and it has been proposed to reuse the batteries with a reliable power source. The microreactor invented by the students overcome the commonly associated problems related to the use of hydrogen such as the need for high level temperature and vacuum to generate the needed chemical-reaction-inducing plasmas for producing hydrogen. There are also several problems and high cost involved in transporting hydrogen due to its volatile qualities.
The microreactor technology introduced by the students utilizes low level temperatures and the prevailing atmospheric pressure to generate hydrogen. To avoid the problems related to its storage and transport, only the needed quantity of hydrogen is generated. The advanced type of reactors are made utilizing the latest microfabrication engineering comparable to the technology utilized in making plasma television screens, which utilize microscale physics to generate plasma under standard atmospheric conditions.
The team has been successful by using methanol to produce hydrogen. During the process methanol is gasified by keeping it in a suspended state in hot nitrogen gas and the produced mixture is transmitted through a 25µm channel in the microreactor. The mix responds with plasma to induce thermal decomposition by cracking down the methanol into its basic components. The team currently conducts realizable yielding tests for a range of starter fuels.