Pietro Tarquini

HycycleS: a project on nuclear and solar hydrogen production by sulphur-based thermochemical cycles

The European FP7 project HycycleS focuses on providing detailed solutions for the design of specific key components for sulphur-based thermochemical cycles for hydrogen production. The key components necessary for the high temperature part of those processes, the thermal decomposition of H2SO4, are a compact heat exchanger for SO3 decomposition for operation by solar and nuclear heat, a receiver-reactor for solar H2SO4 decomposition, and membranes as product separator and as promoter of the SO3 decomposition. Silicon carbide has been identified as the preferred construction material. Its stability is tested at high temperature and in a highly corrosive atmosphere. Another focus is catalyst materials for the reduction of SO3. Requirement specifications were set up as basis for design and sizing of the intended prototypes. Rigs for corrosion tests, catalyst tests and selectivity of separation membranes have been designed, built and completed. Prototypes of the mentioned components have been designed and tested.

Life Cycle Assessment of a High Temperature Molten Salt Concentrated Solar Power Plant

The well-known world energetic matter, mainly due to the worldwide growing energy consumption gone with a reduction of oil and gas availability, and to the environmental effects of the indiscriminate use of fossil fuels in our economy, is leading to the development of clean innovative technologies for the reduction of GHG emissions and the creation of a more sustainable economic structure worldwide. But, realizing and installing renewable energy plants have an environmental “footprint” that has to be evaluated to quantify the real impact of renewable technologies on the environment. Nowadays, the most important tool to evaluate this impact of a product is the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). To this aim, several impact categories are defined; among these the most important are the Global Warming, the Abiotic Depletion, the Eutrophication, the Acidification, the Land Use and the Human toxicity. The aim of this work is to present a Life Cycle Assessment of an innovative solar technology, the Molten Salt Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plant, developed by Italian Research Centre ENEA and able to produce clean electricity by using solar energy. The Life Cycle Assessment was carried out by means of the SimaPro7 software, one of the most used LCA software in the world. It is worth assess that these types of software are an indispensable tools for leading LCA studies. In the second part of the study the environmental performance of the CSP plant was compared with th ese of conventional oil and gas power plants.