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Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - 9:30 AM
FUEL 4.3

Bread-Board Fuel Processor Development for Logistic Fuel to Hydrogen using Novel Microfibrous Entrapped Catalysts and Sorbents for PEM Fuel Cell

M. R. Karanjikar, Y. Lu, B. K. Chang, B. J. Tatarchuk, Auburn University, Auburn, AL

The present work deals with hydrogen generation from JP8 (Aviation Fuel) and clean-up of the reformate stream to produce PEM quality hydrogen that would run a PEM fuel cell to operate equipment such as surveillance radar. This is done by means of Fuel Processor. The fuel processor has Reformer, post-former, Water Gas Shift reactors, H2S removal, and Preferential Oxidation of CO and CO2 removal stages. The processor also incorporates Fuel Filter. All these stages incorporate Microfibrous entrapped Catalysts and Sorbents. Microfibrous entrapped materials is a new class of proprietary materials that offer various advantages such as high contacting efficiency, very low pressure drop and efficient thermal management over conventional packed bed approach thereby making the whole processor very compact. The reforming/cracking stage converts JP8 into a mixture of H2, CO, CO2, H2S and lower hydrocarbon mixtures such as C1-C3. Post former stage steam reforms the C1-C3 fractions to H2, CO, and CO2.The typical output of postformer has 40-50% H2, 10-15% CO, 15-25% CO2, 60 ppm H2S and less than 0.5% of hydrocarbons. H2S removal stage removes the H2S present down to less than 0.6 ppm using Microfibrous entrapped adsorbent. After water gas shift reactions using Microfibrous entrapped WGS catalysts, carbon monoxide content reduces to less than 1%. PROX stage reduces CO content to less than 50 ppm. The CO2 removal stage reduces the CO2 from 30% to less than 200 ppm using alkaline sorbents. The fuel filter has various layers few mm thick that can remove the ppm level presence of CO, CO2, H2S and NH3. The output of Fuel Processor is clean CO and H2S free hydrogen. The whole system described here is tested as a single unit. All the associated data of concentration as a function of variables and parameters would be discussed.

Summary: The present work deals with hydrogen generation from JP8 (Aviation Fuel) and clean-up of the steam reformate stream to produce PEM quality hydrogen using microfibrous entrapped catalysts and sorbents. Efficiency, weight, volume, operating conditions, robustness and balance-of-plant details of the fuel processor will be discussed.