Since, I am pretty sure that no other gaseous product could be formed in the conditions of my experiment except hydrogen, so I am pretty sure that I am able to produce hydrogen (by water reduction). Further, I want to measure the quantity of hydrogen produced during my experiment. Could anyone provide a suggestion of how can I trap hydrogen such that I would be able to measure its quantity as well.
Hi
You can use Mass spectrometer; Gas Chromatography (GC). The GC can be connected to a closed tube of where the H2 gas is normally get collected from the hydrolysis processes of H2O.
Refer to the following link;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_chromatography
The method that you use is somewhat dependent on the scale of the experiment in question. For slightly larger scale reactions a gas burette system can be used to very accurately measure evolved hydrogen and many universities have them even in undergraduate teaching labs so they are usually very easy to scrounge up. Before trying to fashion a system yourself ask around to see if any other lab or teaching lab has a working system as this can save you a lot of time and effort to build and celebrate your own system. That being said, if no one in your department has a system then the paper mentioned in the previous comment seams like a really good resource. Here is a paper describing a nice setup but a simple setup can be borrowed or fashioned as well. http://aip.scitation.org.proxy.bc.edu/doi/abs/10.1063/1.2968715?journalCode=rsi
For very small samples GC-MS can be a good option but these instruments are expensive and not every department has one.
Assuming you are doing electrocatalysis, you can easily detect any H2 formed by placing a Pt working electrode near your working electrode with catalyst and apply a potential of 0.5 V vs Ag/AgCl. At this potential the Pt electrode will oxidize H2 back to proton. This is for detection. You would normally need a bipotentiostat for this experiment. If you have a RRDE set-up then this becomes even easier.
For quantification just use an inverted burette set-up as suggested.
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