A novel integrated gas-cooled fast nuclear reactor and vanadium chloride thermochemical cycle for sustainable fuel production

Abstract

The continuous growth of anthropogenic carbon emissions from the aviation industry has emphasized the urgent request to substitute traditional aviation fuels with Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAFs) because SAFs can potentially reduce carbon emissions by around 50–90% as compared to traditional kerosene-based fuels. In this paper, a novel SAF production pathway is developed which is based on biomass processing, nuclear energy, and thermochemical reactions of the vanadium chloride cycle for SAF, clean power, and hydrogen production. The entire system is assessed thermodynamically in terms of energy and exergy performances. Various sensitivity analyses are computed to determine the reliable operating parameters. The study concludes that biomass-to-SAF energetic and exergetic performance is achieved to be 76.72% and 74.35%. The energetic and exergetic performance values, through efficiencies, of the V–Cl cycle are calculated to be 68.08% and 53.50%, respectively. For hydrogen production and storage, an energy penalty of around 16.83 kJ/kg H2 is calculated, which results in an efficiency penalty of 6.18%. The overall energetic and exergetic efficiencies of the proposed integrated system are found to be around 59.79% and 23.78%, respectively.