Objective of the Project:

Create and investigate fundamental characteristics of a direct flame fuel cell (DFFC) system consisting of an anode supported solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) with a meterable porous-medium combustor, featuring higher thermal shock resistance, cooking resistance, efficiency and performance.

Overview:

To address this objective it will be used a simple no-chamber fuel cell configuration, where the anode will face the exhaust gases from the combustion and the cathode will use the ambient air. For the combustion process a meterable porous-medium will be used as a fuel reformer to produce syngas (hydrogen and carbon monoxide) which will be used for the fuel cell as a fuel. Moreover, the porous-medium will produce a high temperature and will be the heat source of the DFFC. Finally to investigate the heat transfer and how the combustion happens inside the porous medium, it will be developed a high fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation which will be very useful as a predictive tool for extensive parametric studies.

Areas of application:

With the DFFC system with a porous medium combustor we can get several advantages. First of all, this system can have a simple setup and a rapid start up because of the high temperature conditions. Moreover, the porous medium acting as a fuel reformer will make the system able to use a big ranges of fuels, such as methane, propane and others hydrocarbons. These advantages create a big range of applications for this system. For example, it can be put in the exhaust pipes of furnace, automobiles or even airplanes and at the same time it will generate electric energy increasing thermal efficiency and decreasing the emissions. Another possible application is to put only the direct flame fuel cell during the combustion of solid waste which produces a lot of syngas and then generate energy.

The principle of work is that the hot gases transfer energy to the solid by convection and then the solid with high thermal conductivity transfer energy through the solid and to reactants gases by conduction and radiation. In other words the porous acts as a pre-heater of the incoming gases making the combustion to get high temperatures and to produce high amount of syngas.