Kinetics of Internal Methane Steam Reforming in Solid Oxide Fuel Cells and Its Influence on Cell Performance- Coupling Experiments and Modeling

摘要

Mathematical modeling tools are useful for predicting the safe operation limits and efficiencies of SOFCs. For a particular SOFC design, variations in internal methane reforming kinetic parameters is expected to affect local gas compositions, local Nernst voltages, current densities and temperature profiles and in turn the safe operation limits and efficiency. However, it is observed that methane reforming kinetic data widely used in SOFC CFD models are often determined from measurements on nickel catalysts taken under experimental conditions not close enough to SOFC operation conditions causing significant inaccuracies in model calculation results. For this reason, kinetic properties of the methane steam reforming reaction in complete fuel cells with Ni-GDC (Gd_(0.1)Ce_(0.9)O_2) anodes were experimentally evaluated. SOFCs with different anodes made of different materials may perform differently due to the different reforming kinetics and the different thermal properties.