Abstract
Owing to the pollution free nature, higher efficiency and noise free operation, fuel cells have been identified as ideal energy sources for the future. To avoid direct storage of hydrogen due to safety considerations, storing hydrocarbon fuel such as methane and suitably reforming in situ for hydrogen production offers merit for further investigation. Separating the resulting hydrogen in the reformate using membrane separation can directly feed pure gas to the anode side of fuel cell for power generation. Despite the numerous works reported in literature on the dynamic and steady state modeling and analysis of reformers, membrane separation units and fuel cell systems, there has been limited work on an analysis of the integrated system consisting of all the three components. This study focuses on the mathematical modeling and analysis of the integrated reformer, membrane, fuel cell system from first principles in a dynamic framework. A multi loop control strategy is developed and implemented on the mathematical model of the integrated system in which appropriate controllers based on the system dynamics are designed to examine and study the overall closed loop performance to achieve rapidly fluctuating target power demand and rejection of reformer feed and fuel cell coolant temperature disturbances.
Highlights
The main focus of emergent hydrogen economy for the last few decades has been on the use of hydrogen fuel cells for stationary and portable applications
In the case of fuel cells driven by hydrogen, the prevailing method to deliver hydrogen entails storing of the fuel in appropriately designed high pressure tanks that can withstand high pressures of the order of 350 to 700 bars [1]
Without incorporating controllers into the loop, an open loop start-up simulation is carried out first to analyze the dynamic nature of the integrated reformer membrane fuel cell system
Summary
The main focus of emergent hydrogen economy for the last few decades has been on the use of hydrogen fuel cells for stationary and portable applications. Ref [10] examined the dynamic electrochemical model of a PEMFC along with a methanol reformer and a power conditioning unit This latter work used a simplified transfer function-based fuel cell model and did not discuss the possibility of integration of the units. The second case study involves the integrated system used for a generic power application with suitably designed controllers and the final case study evaluates disturbance rejection by considering uncertainty in both the inlet CH4 feed concentration to the reformer as well as coolant temperature in fuel cell. This is followed by simulation results and discussions.
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