The calculation of specific heats for some important solid components in hydrogen production process based on CuCl cycle

Abstract

Hydrogen is one of the most promising energy sources of the future enabling direct production of power and heat in fuel cells, hydrogen engines or furnaces with hydrogen burners. One of the last remainder problems in hydrogen technology is how to produce a sufficient amount of cheap hydrogen. One of the best options is large scale thermochemical production of hydrogen in combination with nuclear power plant. copper-chlorine (CuCl) cycle is the most promissible thermochemical cycle to produce cheap hydrogen.This paper focuses on a CuCl cycle, and the describes the models how to calculate thermodynamic properties. Unfortunately, for many components in CuCl cycle the thermochemical functions of state have never been measured. This is the reason that we have tried to calculate some very important thermophysical properties. This paper discusses the mathematical model for computing the thermodynamic properties for pure substances and their mixtures such as CuCl, HCl, Cu2OCl2 important in CuCl hydrogen production in their fluid and solid phase with an aid of statistical thermodynamics. For the solid phase, we have developed the mathematical model for the calculation of thermodynamic properties for polyatomic crystals. In this way, we have used Debye functions and Einstein function for acoustical modes and optical modes of vibrations to take into account vibration of atoms. The influence of intermolecular energy we have solved on the basis of Murnaghan equation of state and statistical thermodynamics.