Hydrogen Test Chamber

The transparent reactor was a device designed to watch hydrogen generating aluminum-water reactions to better understand the reaction when pressurized.

It's difficult to keep enough energy on board for long-distance marine vehicles, especially for those unmanned or submerged. One potential solution is using aluminum, which is extremely energy dense, and can react with water to form hydrogen. By using aluminum fuel pellets to react with seawater, hydrogen to power the vessel can be created with minimum fuel to carry on board. This type of fuel is still being researched, and a critical issue arose for deep sea applications when researchers found that aluminum pellets did not fully react with water when the system was pressurized.

I built a transparent reactor chamber so the team could watch the reaction, collecting video, pressure, and temperature data. Different lengths of transparent tube could be used in the chamber to run both high and low pressure experiments. This project was a bit outside my comfort zone as I'm accustomed to mechanical design rather than chemistry, but I built the chamber, ran experiments, and conducted data analysis. Interestingly, I discovered the reaction was failing due to a mechanical issue rather than a chemical one. The pressure held the aluminum pellets together, so once the outer layer finished reacting, the process stopped.