Thermal analysis of cylindrical natural-gas steam reformer for 5 kW PEMFC

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• 作者：Taehyun Jo ; Junhee Han ; Bonchan Koo ; Dohyung Lee
• 刊名：Heat and Mass Transfer
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：November 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：52
• 期：11
• 页码：2459-2469
• 全文大小：1,678 KB
• 刊物类别：Engineering
• 刊物主题：Engineering Thermodynamics and Transport Phenomena
  Industrial Chemistry and Chemical Engineering
  Thermodynamics
  Physics and Applied Physics in Engineering
  Theoretical and Applied Mechanics
  Engineering Fluid Dynamics
  
• 出版者：Springer Berlin / Heidelberg
• ISSN：1432-1181
• 卷排序：52

文摘

The thermal characteristics of a natural-gas based cylindrical steam reformer coupled with a combustor are investigated for the use with a 5 kW polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell. A reactor unit equipped with nickel-based catalysts was designed to activate the steam reforming reaction without the inclusion of high-temperature shift and low-temperature shift processes. Reactor temperature distribution and its overall thermal efficiency depend on various inlet conditions such as the equivalence ratio, the steam to carbon ratio (SCR), and the fuel distribution ratio (FDR) into the reactor and the combustor components. These experiments attempted to analyze the reformer’s thermal and chemical properties through quantitative evaluation of product composition and heat exchange between the combustor and the reactor. FDR is critical factor in determining the overall performance as unbalanced fuel injection into the reactor and the combustor deteriorates overall thermal efficiency. Local temperature distribution also influences greatly on the fuel conversion rate and thermal efficiency. For the experiments, the operation conditions were set as SCR was in range of 2.5–4.0 and FDR was in 0.4–0.7 along with equivalence ratio of 0.9–1.1; optimum results were observed for FDR of 0.63 and SCR of 3.0 in the cylindrical steam reformer.