Comparative studies of various fuel reforming methods

Abstract

The production of energy without polluting our atmosphere is one of the key challenges faced by our generation. Fuel cell, is one of the promising technology to produce clean energy to our future, needs clean hydrogen and air as their feed. Finding out optimum condition for the production of hydrogen from various fuels is one of the primary investigations of fuel reforming laboratory ofNanyang Technological University (NTU).

The goal of this thesis presented here is about predict the optimum condition for the production of hydrogen from ethanol. However, hydrogen gas produced through ethanol will contain lot of interference gases such as acetaldehyde (CH3CHO), acetone (CH3COCH3) , ethylene (C2H4) apart from main byproducts (CO, CO2, H2, H20 ) that make it difficult for the gas analyzer (NOYA) used in my experiment to determine the accurate values of hydrogen concentration. The fact on

possibilities of various interference gases are verified by the numerous publications [1-13]. The experiment was carried out on a cylinder of 10mm internal diameter and 400mm length with different molar air to fuel ratio and water fuel ratio by employing both platinum and palladium catalyst supported on gamma alumina. The experimental results show that for Steam Reforming hydrogen production primarily depends on temperature; the optimum condition found by employing platinum as catalyst is at temperature on 900°C and W/F ratio of 7.5, where maximum yield of 24.95% hydrogen is obtained. Similar condition is also found by using

palladium as catalyst, where optimum condition is found at WIF ratio of 9.5 and at temperature on 900°C. From the value of experimental hydrogen output, it is observed that for the Partial Oxidation reaction the hydrogen production primarily depends on ethanol flow rate.