Phase II is a three year effort involving a long-term collaboration with the National Laboratories, interested solar manufacturers and polymer suppliers and fabricators. Solar Thermolysis of Hydrogen Sulfide Hydrogen sulfide should be a valuable natural resource, a source of energy-rich hydrogen and commodity sulfur. Instead, it is an undesirable waste product produced in the processing of petroleum, coal and natural gas. The current approach to the disposal of H2S is the Claus process. Elemental sulfur is recovered, but the associated hydrogen is burned.
Expensive treatment is required to remove SOx from the effluent gas.
The cost of meeting environmental regulations exceeds the value of the recovered sulfur. A potentially attractive alternative to the Claus process is a thermolysis process which produces hydrogen and sulfur with no need for environmental control. In this study we are interested in the rates of thermal decomposition of H2S in ceramic packed beds. Our first experiments produced the first data of dissociation rates in the temperature range most attractive for industrial processes. We confirmed the importance of the reactor surface area on the global dissociation rate in an alumina reactor bed.