• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2008.05a
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• pp.57-60
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• 2008

KEPRI has studied planar type SOFC stacks using anode-supported single cells and kW class co-generation systems for residential power generation. A 1kW class SOFC system consisted of a hot box part, a cold BOP part and a water reservoir. A hot box part contains a SOFC stack made up of 48 single cells and ferritic stainless steel interconnectors, a fuel reformer, a catalytic combustor and heat exchangers. Thermal management and insulation system were especially designed for self-sustainable operation. A cold BOP part was composed of blowers, pumps, a water trap and system control units. When a 1kW class SOFC system was operated at $750^{\circ}C$ with hydrogen after pre-treatment process, the stack power was 1.2kW at 30 A and 1.6kW at 50A. Turning off an electric furnace, the SOFC system was operated using hydrogen and city gas without any external heat source. Under self-sustainable operation conditions, the stack power was about 1.3kW with hydrogen and 1.2kW with city gas respectively. The system also recuperated heat of about 1.1kW by making hot water.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.140-148
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• 2005

The molten carbonate fuel cell (MCFC) is endowed with the high potential especially in future electric power generation industry by its own outstanding characteristics. KEPCO (KEPRI) started a 100 kW MCFC system development program in 1993 and has been executed 100kW system develpilot plant successfully completed first phaseopment by 2005 on the basis of successful results of 25kW system development. In this program, the components and mechanical structure for 100 kW stack and system construction were completed on last year and now system pre - commissioning was being executed. A 100 kW MCFC power plant was constructed at the site of Boryeong Thermal Power Plant. A 100 kW MCFC system has characterized as a high pressure operation mode, CO2 recycle, and externally reforming power generation system. The 100 kW MCFC system consisted with stacks which was made by two 50 kW sub-stacks, 90 cells with 6,000 cm2 active area and BOP including a reformer, a recycle blower, a catalytic burner, an inverter, and etc. The system has been operated from 13th of September on this year and produced 50 kW AC under atmospheric pressure condition and expected to operate by the end of this year.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.32 no.7
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• pp.497-503
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• 2008

Hydrogen is considered as a fuel of the future for its renewability and environmental compatibility. The reforming of hydrocarbon fuels is currently the most important source of hydrogen, which is expected to continue for next several decades. In this study, extensive CFD simulations on the steam-methane reforming process were conducted to study the performance of four reaction models, i.e. three Arrhenius-type models and a user-defined function (UDF) model. The accuracies of different reaction models for various operating temperatures and steam carbon ratios (SCRs) were evaluated by comparing their CFD results with zero-dimensional intrinsic model of Xu and Froment. It was found that the UDF model generally produced more accurate results than Arrhenius-type models. However, it was also shown that Arrhenius-type models could be made sufficiently accurate by choosing appropriate reaction coefficients, and thus could also be useful for the simulation of the steam-methane reforming process.

• Transactions of the Korean hydrogen and new energy society
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.485-489
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• 2019

Hydrogen is known to be a clean fuel which does not generate a green house gas during the combustion. However, about 8 kg of carbon dioxide is generated during the course of producing 1 kg of hydrogen through reforming, water gas shift reaction and pressure swing adsorption in order to obtain a high purity hydrogen over 99.999% by volume. In this work, carbon dioxide generation is estimated according to four kinds of natural gas compositions supplied by Korea Gas Corporation and regarding natural gas as pure methane. For the simulation of the modeling, PRO/II with PROVISION V10.2 at AVEVA was utilized and Peng-Robinson equation of state with Twu's alpha function was selected.

• Korean Chemical Engineering Research
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• v.61 no.2
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• pp.328-339
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• 2023

Methanol steam reforming (MSR) is a promising method for hydrogen supplying as a critical step in hydrogen fuel cell commercialization in mobile applications. Modelling and understanding of the reactor behavior is an attractive research field to develop an efficient reformer. Three-layer feed-forward artificial neural network (ANN) and Box-Behnken design (BBD) were used to modelling of MSR process using the Cu-SiO₂ aerogel catalyst. Furthermore, impacts of the basic operational variables and their mutual interactions were studied. The results showed that the most affecting parameters were the reaction temperature (56%) and its quadratic term (20.5%). In addition, it was also found that the interaction between temperature and Steam/Methanol ratio is important on the MSR performance. These models precisely predict MSR performance and have great agreement with experimental results. However, on the basis of statistical criteria the ANN technique showed the greater modelling ability as compared with statistical BBD approach.

• Transactions of the Korean hydrogen and new energy society
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.277-285
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• 2001

We developed a compact, 10 kWe, purifier-integrated reformer which supplies hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles. Our proprietary technologies regarding hydrogen purification by palladium alloy membrane and catalytic combustion by noble metal coated wire-mesh catalyst were combined with the conventional methanol steam reforming technology, resulting in higher conversion, excellent quality of product hydrogen, and better thermal efficiency than any other systems. In this system, steam reforming, hydrogen purification, and catalytic combustion take place all in a single reactor so that the whole system is compact and easy to operate. The module produces $8.2Nm^3/hr$ of 99.999% or higher purity hydrogen with CO impurity less than 10 ppm, which is equivalent to 10 kWe when PEMFC has 45 % efficiency. Thermal efficiency of the module is 81 % and the power density of the module is 1.6 L/kWe. As the results of experiments, cold-start time has been measured about 20 minutes. Response time of hydrogen production to the change of the feed rate has been within 1 minutes.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2009.06a
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• pp.361-364
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• 2009

KEPRI has studied planar type SOFC stacks using anode-supported single cells and kW class co-generation systems for residential power generation. A 1kW class SOFC system consisted of a hot box part, a cold BOP part and a water reservoir. A hot box part contains a SOFC stack made up of 48 cells with $10{\times}10cm^2$ area and ferritic stainless steel interconnectors, a fuel reformer, a catalytic combustor and heat exchangers. Thermal management and insulation system were especially designed for self-sustainable operation. A cold BOP part was composed of blowers, pumps, a water trap and system control units. When a 1kW class SOFC system was operated at $750^{\circ}C$ with hydrogen, the stack power was 1.2kW at 30 A and 1.6kW at 50A. Turning off an electric furnace, the SOFC system was operated using hydrogen and city gas without any external heat source. Under self-sustainable operation conditions, the stack power was about 1.3kW with hydrogen and 1.2kW with city gas respectively. The system also recuperated heat of about 1.1kW by making hot water. Recently KEPRI developed stacks using $15{\times}15cm^2$ cells and tested them. KEPRI will develop a 5 kW class CHP system using $15{\times}15cm^2$ stacks by 2010.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2008.11b
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• pp.3049-3052
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• 2008

MCFC(molten carbonate fuel cell) power generation system is prime candidate for the utilization of fossil based fuels to generate ultra clean power with a high efficiency. In the MCFC power plant system, a combustor performs a role to supply high temperature mixture gases for cathode and heat for reformer by using the stack off-gas of the anode which includes a high concentration of $H_2O$ and $CO_2$. Since a combustor needs to be operated in a very lean condition and to avoid excessive local heating, catalytic combustor is usually used. The catalytic combustion is accomplished by the catalytic chemical reaction between fuel and oxidizer at catalyst surface, different from conventional combustion. In this study, a mathematical model for the prediction of internal flow and catalytic combustion characteristics in the catalytic combustor adopted in the MCFC power plant system is suggested by using the numerical methods. The numerical simulation models are then implemented into the commercial CFD code. After verifying result by comparing with the experimental data and calibrated kinetic parameters of catalytic combustion reaction, a numerical simulation is performed to investigate the variation of flow and combustion characteristics by changing such various parameters as inlet configuration and inlet temperature. The result show that the catalytic combustion can be effectively improved for most of the case by using the perforated plate and subsequent stable catalytic combustion is expected.

• Transactions of the Korean hydrogen and new energy society
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.559-571
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• 2012

Dimethyl ether (DME) is a new clean fuel as an environmentally-benign energy resource. DME can be manufactured from various energy sources including natural gas, coal, and biomass. In addition to its environmentally friendly properties, DME has similar characteristics to those of LPG. The aim of this article is to represent the development of new DME process with KOGAS's own technologies. KOGAS has investigated and developed new innovative DME synthesis process from synthesis gas in gaseous phase fixed bed reactor. DME has been traditionally produced by the dehydration of methanol which is produced from syngas, a product of natural gas reforming. This traditional process is thus called the two-step method of preparing DME. However, DME can also be manufactured directly from syngas (single-step). The single-step method needs only one reactor for the synthesis of DME, instead of two for the two-step process. It can also alleviate the thermodynamic limitations associated with the synthesis of methanol, by converting the produced methanol into DME, thereby potentially enhancing the overall conversion of syngas into DME. KOGAS had launched the 10 ton/day DME demonstration plant project in 2004 at Incheon KOGAS LNG terminal. In the mid of 2008, KOGAS had finished the construction of this plant and has successively finished the demonstration plant operation. And since 2008, we have established the basic design of commercial plant which can produce 3,000 ton/day DME.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.40 no.3
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• pp.173-179
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• 2016

This is a numerical study on the curved channel type of hydrogen reformer using the commercial code of fluid dynamics. We numerically compared the numerical model in a previous study model and the modelling of a tube type curved channel. In the result of numerical analysis on 4 types of curved channel reformers, the methanol conversion efficiency of type 1~4 were 45.0%, 45.3%, 45.6%, 45.6% respectively, and there was hardly any difference by ${\pm}0.6%$. In light of flow characteristics, the rectangle type tube and the type 2 with $45^{\circ}$ turn showed most uniform flow characteristics and concentration distribution of methanol, and the circular type tube and the type 3 with $90^{\circ}$ turn had most un-uniform flow characteristics and concentration distribution of methanol. We concluded that the design for curved channel reformer has to have rectangle type tube with curve of almost $45^{\circ}$ as in the type of curved pipe with $45^{\circ}$ turn.