Development of CO2 hydrogenation-water electrolysis tandem reactor

As a new ECLSS technology for future manned space missions, the authors have developed a tandem water electrolysis and CO2 hydrogenation reactor to generate methane and water. The reactor concept is based on a water electrolyzer thermally coupled to a CO2 hydrogenation reactor which directly transfers thermal energy generated by the catalytic CO2 methanation (as known as the Sabatier reaction) to the water electrolyzer. In this paper, we report that 1 L/min-scale hydrogen production with corresponding CO2 methanation was achieved by further developing a scale-model tandem reactor.