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Project Description


The Renewable Energy Based Hydrogen Production project was our senior design project. It is a requirement of the course ME 486, the final engineering design course in NAU's Design 4 Practice sequence of design courses. The project was done during the 2002-2003 school year.

The ultimate goal of this project is to demonstrate that hydrogen can be used to fuel a vehicle, and that this hydrogen can be produced from entirely renewable sources. When consumed as a fuel, hydrogen produces only heat and water vapor, making it the ultimate environmentally friendly fuel.

Northern Arizona University is in an advantageous position for conducting this project. Its Renwable Energy Resource Center already provides electricity generated from renewable sources (wind turbines and solar panels) as a result of previous student projects. The challenge for our team was how to use this electrical energy to produce a hydrogen fuel.

We designed a system that uses renewably generated electricity and rainwater to produce hydrogen gas. The system consists of several components - we found out that producing hydrogen from renewable sources is no simple task!