Owing to the increasingly apparent climate change, it becomes imperative to use renewable energy in the pr oduction of fuel that is environmentally friendly. At the same time, there is a need to introduce the related education programs to develop the skills of the technical staff working at the front line of rapidly developing renewable ene rgy technologies. Hydrogen is expected to be the fuel in the near future. At present hydrogen fuel is mainly pr oduced using steam reforming of methane (SRM). However, hydrogen generation using the SRM results in emission of greenhouse gases and climate change. Therefore, there is a common consensus that the SRM technology will soon be challenged by the technologies of solar hydrogen generation using photoelectrochemical cells (PEC). However, the PEC technology will be the ultimate winner only if the effects related to climate change and poll ution are fully monetised. While such radical development is difficult for implementation due to economic reasons, the increasingly urgent need to reduce climate change dictates the need to increase competitiveness of the PEC method. This imposes the need to increase the efficiency of the solar energy conversion and reduce the costs of the related raw materials and devices. The development of renewable energy-related technologies, such as those related to solar hydrogen, imposes the need to introduce education programs in order to train technical and research staff working at the front line of rapidly developing sustainable energy systems. The present work considers such programs addressing a range of energyrelated topics, such as hydrogen energy, electrochemical energy, photoelectrochemical energy and alternative renewable energy as well as industrial ecology and energy policy. It is concluded that implementation of these programs is urgently needed in order to protect the environment through sustainable development.

 

For the first time ever, the main aspects of a move by humankind into the era of an ecologically clean hydrogen energy civilization are being considered. It has been shown that energy and environmental problems can be averted by changing our energy carrier from fossil fuels to the environmentally clean energy carrier, hydrogen. The biospheric and noospheric consequences of this transition have been analyzed. The steps to be taken for the move to such a future hydrogen civilization have been discussed.

 

The Third International Conference “Hydrogen Treatment of Materials” (HTM-2001), Donetsk, May 14–18, 2001 was the first international hydrogen meeting held under the effect of a new conception “From a Hydrogen Economy to a Hydrogen Civilization”, which was first developed by V.A. Goltsov and T.N. Veziroglu. That was a meeting of the representatives of three subcommunities of the world hydrogen movements: the hydrogen energy subcommunity, the hydrogen-materials subcommunities and the subcommunity of industrialists ensuring safety and efficiency of hydrogen use in terms of the up-to-date industry. More than 130 members from 60 organizations in the USA, Great Britain, Spain, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Libya and Japan took part in the conference. Such a participation let the conference cover the achievements of hydrogen economy, hydrogen treatment of materials, and global subjects of a transition to Hydrogen Civilization of the future. At the final plenary meeting, the participants discussed and adopted the memorandum calling upon the world community, peoples and states to unite their efforts and to contribute with all the expertise attained to the transition of the humankind to the era of Hydrogen Civilization.

 

The grapho-analytical method is expected to guarantee more precise outcomes when applied to the analysis of (T, V), P = const; (P, 1 = V ), T = const diagrams for gases. Results for hydrogen gas (H2) give outcomes principally distinguished from similar researches for carbon dioxide (CO₂), oxygen (O₂), argon (Ar), helium(He), neon (Ne) and other gases.

 

The fullerene is the fourth allotropic modification of carbon and its properties, as volume, gravimetric and electrochemical capacities, are in excess of many similar properties of metal hydrides and hydrocarbons. The solution of the problem of the reversible hydrogenation of each carbon atom in the frame of fullerene molecule will allow to create the hydrogen storage with the capacity up to 7.7 wt.% H. A series of experiments have been conducted to evaluate the full hydrogenation of fullerite C₆₀; hydrofullerenes have been produced experimentally with the variable content of hydrogen. The optimum regime of C₆₀ hydrogenation has been determined resulting in the full hydrogenation of fullerene molecule C₆₀. As was apparent after the tests, the sequence of formation of hydrogenated fullerene molecule C₆₀H₆₀ in fullerite has been going in the following order: the molecular hydrogen dissolution in octahedral interstices of fcc lattice of fullerite, the dissociation of hydrogen molecules in going from octa- to tetrahedral interstices, the interaction of hydrogen atoms with fullerene molecule. It has been demonstrated that chemisorption process of hydrogen by molecule C₆₀ is limited by diffusive processes in fullerite after hydrogen concentration conformed to C₆₀H₃₆. The spectral analysis has shown that the second stage process of chemisorption follows the compressive shell model. The suggestion of the model of processes going on at the interaction between H₂ and fullerite C₆₀ has been made. The mechanism for the definition of hydrogenation degree of molecule C₆₀ has been proposed in the present paper.

 

The increasing demand for sustainable energy results in the development of new technologies of energy generation. The key objective of hydrogen economy is the introduction of hydrogen as main energy carrier, along with electricity, on a global scale. The key goal is the development of hydrogen-related technologies needed for hydrogen generation, hydrogen storage, hydrogen transportation and hydrogen distribution as well as hydrogen safety systems. It is commonly believed that hydrogen is environmentally clean since its combustion results in the formation of water. However, the technology currently employed for the generation of hydrogen from natural gas, does in fact lead to the emission of greenhouse gases and climate change. Therefore, the key issues in the introduction of hydrogen economy involve the development of environmentally clean hydrogen production technology as well as storage and transport. The clean options available for hydrogen generation using nuclear energy; such as advanced nuclear fission and, ultimately, nuclear fusion, are discussed. The latter, which is environmentally clean, is expected to be the primary approach in the production of hydrogen fuel at the global scale. The present work considers the effect of hydrogen on properties of TiO2 and its solid solutions in the contexts of photocatalytic energy conversion and the effect of tritium on advanced tritium breeders.

 

Biological hydrogen production processes offer a technique through which renewable energy sources like biomass can be utilized for the generation of the cleanest energy carrier for the use of mankind. Hydrogen intensive research work has already been carried out on the advancement of these processes, such as the development of genetically modified microorganism, metabolic engineering, improvement of the reactor designs, use of different solid matrices for the immobilization of whole cells, biochemical assisted bioreactor, development of two-stage processes, etc. for  higher H₂-production rates. Maximum H₂ yield is found to be 7.1 mol H₂/mol glucose. However, major bottlenecks for the commercialization of these processes are lower H₂ yield and rate of H₂ production. Suitable microbial cultures are required to handle waste materials efficiently, which are usually complex in nature. This will serve dual purposes: clean energy generation and bioremediation. Scale-up studies on fermentative H₂-production processes have been done successfully. Pilot plant trials of the photo-fermentation processes require more attention. Use of cheaper raw materials and efficient biological hydrogen production processes will surely make them more competitive with the conventional H₂generation processes in near future.

 

The results from the laboratory-scale extraction pilot plant unit for the separation of H₂S from Black Sea water lead us to build a novel industrial extraction pilot plant to concentrate H₂S from 10 ppm to above 10000 ppm. The processing of 10⁹ m ³ of water containing 10 ppm will produce 0.833 tons of hydrogen and therefore a technology for extraction and concentration of H₂S is essential. The conceptual pilot plant proposed in this paper is in principle similar to the laboratory pilot plant developed in the University of Duhok, Iraq, and it could work to pump water directly from Black Sea. It contains a screen with electrical heater to fix the temperature of stripping, a water chiller at the top to separate any water droplet or vapor. The research on industrial pilot plant has shown that, this unit could operate both on and underneath the surface of the sea.

 

The delamination and degradation of solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) electrode/electrolyte interface is estimated by calculating the stresses generated within the different layers of the cell. The stresses developed in a SOFC are usually assumed to be homogenous through a cross section in the mathematical models at macroscopic scales. However, during the operating of these composite materials the real stresses on the multiphase porous layers might be very different than those at macro-scale. Therefore micro-level modeling is needed for an accurate estimation of the real stresses and the performance of SOFC. This study combines the microstructural characterization of a porous solid oxide fuel cell anode/electrolyte with two dimensional mechanical and electrochemical ana yses to investigate the stress and the overpotential. The microstructure is determined by using focused ion beam (FIB) tomography and the resulting microstructures are used to generate a solid mesh of two dimensional triangular elements. COMSOL Multiphysics package is employed to calculate the principal stress and Maxwell Stefan Diffusion. The stress field is calculated from room temperature to operating temperature while the overpotential is calculated at operating temperature.