Palladium(II) Chloride Catalytic Methanolysis of Hydrazine Borane for Enhanced Hydrogen Production

Hydrazine borane (HB) is emerging as one of the most promising hydrogen carriers due to its high gravimetric hydrogen storage capacity (15.4 wt%). However, thermolysis of HB suffers from slow reaction rate, foaming issue and release of unfavourable by-products such as hydrazine and ammonia which are poisons to fuel cell catalyst. To resolve these problems, instead of thermolysis, herein, methanolysis has been studied to extract hydrogen from HB, using palladium(II) chloride, PdCl2 as catalyst. In this study, the order of the reaction, activation parameters such as activation energy (E-a), activation enthalpy (Delta H-#) and entropy (Delta S-#) have been determined by carrying out catalytic methanolysis at different concentrations of HB, PdCl2 and temperatures. Determination of true active catalyst, catalyst reuseability and pathway analysis of the reaction have also been studied.