Indoor air pollution from burning solid fuels causes approximately four million premature deaths annually, making it the leading cause of death after high blood pressure and smoking. Cleaner fuel sources can improve health while preserving forests, improving local air quality and mitigating impacts on climate change. Unfortunately, while solar power is gaining traction in the developing world, infrastructure and cost create barriers to its use for cooking and heating at night.

Building off the work of previous teams, this team researched current trends around biomass as a fuel source for cooking and investigated the generation, storage and combustion of hydrogen fuel to create an affordable and clean household fuel alternative. In 2021-2022, the team developed a scaled-up electrolyzer, achieved repeated compression-and-release cycles for storage and constructed a working hydrogen fuel stove.

The next step for this multiyear team is to improve system efficiencies and components and analyze system costs, as well as field test and scale a new unified system in a village in India.

Hydrogen Generation, Storage and Stove Technology to Mitigate Indoor Air Pollution

Poster by Andrew Liu, Sarah Macia and Jeremy Fertig