Five Kilowatt Solid Oxide Fuel Cell/Diesel Reformer

摘要

Reducing fossil fuel consumption both for energy security and for reduction in global greenhouse emissions has been a major goal of energy research in the US for many years. Fuel cells have been proposed as a technology that can address both these issues--as devices that convert the energy of a fuel directly into electrical energy, they offer low emissions and high efficiencies. These advantages are of particular interest to remote power users, where grid connected power is unavailable, and most electrical power comes from diesel electric generators. Diesel fuel is the fuel of choice because it can be easily transported and stored in quantities large enough to supply energy for small communities for extended periods of time. This projected aimed to demonstrate the operation of a solid oxide fuel cell on diesel fuel, and to measure the resulting efficiency. Results from this project have been somewhat encouraging, with a laboratory breadboard integration of a small scale diesel reformer and a Solid Oxide Fuel Cell demonstrated in the first 18 months of the project. This initial demonstration was conducted at INEEL in the spring of 2005 using a small scale diesel reformer provided by SOFCo and a fuel cell provided by Acumentrics. However, attempts to integrate and automate the available technology have not proved successful as yet. This is due both to the lack of movement on the fuel processing side as well as the rather poor stack lifetimes exhibited by the fuel cells. Commercial product is still unavailable, and precommercial devices are both extremely expensive and require extensive field support.