The Hydrogen Production and CO₂ capture group of ECN has a large number of state-of-the-art test equipment for catalysts and sorbents. We are able to evaluate catalysts for a variety of processes and on many different scales. The different processes for which we contest catalysts include:

• Reforming of natural gas, LPG, Diesel, Kerosine, ethanol, biofuels, etc. into hydrogen
• Water gas shift reaction
• Preferential oxydation of CO
• CO₂ adsorption
• N₂O decomposition in e.g. a nitric acid plant exhaust
• NOx removal from car exhasuts, gas engines, etc.
• Methanisation

  

 Our equipment consists of:

• 3 microflow reactors with a capacity till 0,1 Nl/min
• a high-throughput testing unit with 6 parallel reactors (0,1Nl/min each)
• 2 miniflow reactors  (10 Nl/min)
• 2 modulaire fuel processor testingunits on scale of 0,5-6kW hydrogen production
• reactortesting unit on scale of 2kW

6 parallel flow reactor

Characterisations

At our group we have the following equipment for characterisation:

• Temperature programmed desorption (TPD)
• Temperature programmed reduction/oxidation (TPR/O)
• Temperature programmed reaction (TPRx)
• Pulse chemisorption
• Catalyst treatment
• Flow BET surface area
• In-situ cell for infrared spectroscopy (DRIFT)

Furthermore we can analyse by ECN with the following equipment:

• Electron microscopy (SEM and TEM)
• Elemental analysis (ICP)
• TGA
• Porosimetry
• XRD
• AFM 

Programs

Our group uses a variety of commercial and in-house developed software programs and databases for modelling and "quasi" steady state and dynamic stimulations of energy systems.

• TOPICS (an ECB developed program for development and evaluation of energy systems with non-examinable and periodic energy supply).
•  Aspen Plus
• Cycle-Tempo
•  Odessy-Pro
•  GT-Pro
•  @Risk