Monitoring, analysis, and quantification of hydrogen from biomass and biowaste: A review

Hydrogen is called to play a crucial role in decarbonizing different sectors by meaningfully reducing their emissions. Hydrogen production from biomass and biowaste has recently gained momentum due to the high availability of the resource and maturity of thermochemical conversion technologies. However, hydrogen monitoring and purification is required to optimize the process and to meet end-point-applications specifications. This paper provides a comprehensive state-of-the-art on the hydrogen monitoring, analysis, and quantification techniques, with a focus on gas mixtures containing hydrogen. Precision, response time, stability, selectivity of the methods together with other key parameters namely poisoning, interaction with other gases, hydrogen concentration, operating conditions, are confronted. The need for fast and precise hydrogen quantification, especially in the case of complex gaseous mixtures and for high-grade hydrogen applications, together with the need of reliable standards and materials able to provide fast hydrogen adsorption-desorption cycles are the main challenges that arise from our analysis.