Electrocatalytic dehydrogenation of 2-propanol in electrochemical hydrogen pump reactor

There are few concerns on the hydrogen source except pure hydrogen and water for anode of electrochemical hydrogen pump (EHP) reactor. In this paper, the possibility of 2-propanol as the substitute of conventional hydrogen source was investigated. Dehydrogenation reaction conditions of 2-propanol were optimized, high performance of dehydrogenation could be obtained under 60 °C with 1.0–2.0 mol L−1 2-propanol. Within 1.2 V, the available current density of 2-propanol reaches 37.7 mA cm−2, which could be equivalent to hundreds of bars hydrogen partial pressure in conventional three-phase hydrogenation reactor. When coupled with phenol hydrogenation in one EHP reactor, results indicate 2-propanol could be successfully performed as anode feed, and performance of phenol is almost as excellent as that in the phenol EHP reactors with hydrogen.