ZBT developed a compact ethanol fuel processor for small scale high temperature and low temperature polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) systems in the range of 200 – 500 W electrical power. Promising markets for reformer fuel cell systems based on ethanol are mobile or portable leisure and security applications as well as small scale stationary off grid power supply and backup power. Main components of the fuel processor which had to be developed were the reformer reactor, the shift-converter, a catalytic burner, evaporators and heat exchangers. Special attention turned on the homogeneous evaporation of the liquid reactants ethanol and water for the reformer and burner and on the development of an efficient and autarkic start up method, respectively. Theoretical as well as experimental work has been carried out for all main components separately including for example catalyst screening and evaporator performance tests in a first project period. Afterwards all components have been assembled to a complete fuel processor which has been qualified with various operation parameter set ups. The overall start up time to receive reformate gas with appropriate quality to feed for example a HT-PEMFC (xCO < 2 %) takes around 30 minutes. At steady state operation the hydrogen power output is around 900 W with H2 and CO fractions of 41.2 % and 1.5 %, respectively.

Table 1: Fuel Processor Performance, Development Status in Comparison to Targets

This work has been presented at 13AIChE® Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA in the Technical Session “Fuel Processing for Hydrogen Production”. The project was partly supported within the BMBF program “ForschungsprämieZwei” under the grant No. 03FPZN0144

For further information see also
Department fuel processing