FROM ETHANOL TO ELECTRICITY THROUGH INTEGRATED STEAM REFORMER AND SOLID OXIDE FUEL CELL SYSTEM

摘要

Ethanol is considered as a green fuel and made from a variety of agricultural products by ethanol fermentation process. Because there are many agricultural products in Thailand, this study focuses on electricity generation in solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) by integrated ethanol steam reformer. In this study, the integrated process of steam reforming and SOFC was thermodynamically studied. The optimum process structure of the system has been investigated by heat integration techniques. At the conceptual design, pinch analysis of the heat exchanger network is used. The model consists of a steam reformer and a water gas shift for a fuel processing feeding SOFC. SOFC is considered to operate at high temperature 1200 K which is an advantage of SOFC system because of the waste heat from SOFC being used to force fuel processing. A result showed that the usable heat from SOFC system was enough to supply the integrated steam reforming and SOFC system.