Engineers (AIChE), which presented him with its prestigious
Institute Award for Excellence in Industrial Gases Technology. Sessions at an AIChE annual meeting and an issue of
the Journal of the Taiwan Institute of Chemical Engineers
have been dedicated to him. From November 2013 to March
2014, he will serve as Cox Visiting Professor in the Department of Energy Resources of Stanford University.
A Patented Hydrogen Filter
At one end of Ma's Goddard Hall lab, which is stocked with
canisters of hydrogen, Erlenmeyer fasks, and tall graduated
cylinders flled with colorful solutions used to fabricate the
membranes, sits an unassuming apparatus of pipes and
tubes, hooked up to a computer. The system, explains Ivan
Mardilovich, a research associate professor who has worked
in the lab since 1999, is pumping hydrogen through a porous
steel tube plated with a thin layer of palladium, a rare
element that resembles platinum and is also used in jewelry.
This obscure transition metal is the key to the entire enterprise.
"It's pretty simple," Ma says. "Palladium has a specifc
property that will dissociate molecular hydrogen into atomic
hydrogen, which is signifcantly smaller."
A membrane is a semipermeable barrier through
which different gases or liquids move at different rates. The
membrane allows some molecules to pass through easily
while others make the journey slowly or are prevented
from crossing. WPI's palladium membrane is engineered to
allow only atomic hydrogen to pass through, while other
gases — including CO2 — stay on the other side.
In practice, the tube-shaped membrane is placed inside
a larger tube (see diagram, page 21). A high-pressure mixture
of H2 and CO2 fows into the outer chamber. Adsorbing on
the palladium surface, the molecular hydrogen dissociates
<
Ed Ma and Ivan Mardilovich, research associate professor of chemical
engineering, review the output of computational models that help Ma's
research team in the Center for Inorganic Membrane Studies develop
and evaluate designs for palladium membranes.
20 > wpi.edu/+research