Document Type

Article

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Publication Details

Journal of the Electrochemical Society

doi: 10.1149/1.3407524

Link: http://jes.ecsdl.org/content/157/7/B975.abstract

Abstract

A tubular solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) stack was modelled and its operation on biomass syn-gas was investigated. The objective of this work was to develop a computer simulation model of a biomass gasification-SOFC (BG-SOFC) system capable of predicting performance under various operating conditions and using diverse fuels. The stack was modelled using Aspen Plus and considers ohmic, activation and concentration losses. It was validated against published data for operation on natural gas. Operating parameters such as fuel and air utilisation factor Uf and Ua, current density j and steam to carbon ratio STCR were varied and found to have significant influence. The model was run on wood and miscanthus syn-gas. The results indicated that there must be a trade-off between voltage, efficiency and power with respect to j and the stack should be operated at low STCR and high Uf. Also, the stack should be operated at a Ua of ~20%. Operation on biomass syn-gas was compared to natural gas operation and as expected, performance degrades. Better stack performance was observed for wood syn-gas compared to miscanthus syn-gas. High efficiencies were predicted making these systems very promising.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1149/1.3205661

Fig 3_sup material.tif (7121 kB)
Figure 3 supplementary material

Fig 4_sup material.tif (6331 kB)
Figure 4 supplementary material

Fig 5_sup material.tif (6360 kB)
Figure 5 supplementary material

Nernst Voltage Calculation_sup material.doc (27 kB)


Share

COinS