On-board hydrogen generation for transport applications: the HotSpot™ methanol processor

Abstract

In the absence of a hydrogen infrastructure, development of effective on-board fuel processors is likely to be critical to the commercialisation of fuel-cell cars. The HotSpot™ reactor converts methanol, water and air in a single compact catalyst bed into a reformate containing mainly CO2 and hydrogen (and unreacted nitrogen). The process occurs by a combination of exothermic partial oxidation and endothermic steam reforming of methanol, to produce 750 l of hydrogen per hour from a 245-cm3 reactor. The relative contribution of each reaction can be tuned to match the system requirements at a given time. Scale-up is achieved by the parallel combination of the required number of individual HotSpot reactors, which are fed from a central manifold. Using this modular design, the start-up and transient characteristics of a large fuel-processor are identical to that of a single reactor. When vaporised liquid feed and air are introduced into cold reactors, 100% output is achieved in 50 s; subsequent changes in throughput result in instantaneous changes in output. Surplus energy within the fuel-cell powertrain can be directed to the manifold, where it can be used to vaporise the liquid feeds and so promote steam reforming, resulting in high system efficiency. The small amount of CO that is produced by the HotSpot reactions is attenuated to <10 ppm by a catalytic clean-up unit. The HotSpot concept and CO clean-up strategy are not limited to the processing of methanol, but are being applied to other organic fuels.