Thermodynamic assessment of thermochemical cycle for hydrogen production based on water decomposition with binary copper chlorine couple

The present study aims at investigating and simulating the hydrogen cycle production at low temperatures using thermochemical reactions. The cycle used in this work is based on the dissociation of water molecules depending on a copper chlorine couple. Furthermore, the proposed method uses mainly thermal energy provided by a solar thermal field. This proposed cycle differs from what is found in the literature. However, most of the thermochemical cycles for hydrogen production work at quite high temperatures which is a technical challenge. Therefore, the maximum temperature used in the present cycle is limited to 500◦C. A thermodynamic analysis based on both the first and second laws is performed to evaluate the energy, exergy and efficiency of each reaction as well as the overall exergetic efficiency of the system. Furthermore, a parametric study is conducted to figure out the impact of the surrounding temperatures on the overall exergetic efficiency using commercial energy simulation software. The results show that the cycle can achieve an exergy efficiency of 30.5%.