Support for the high efficiency, carbon separation and internal reforming capabilities of solid oxide fuel cell systems

Re: “Support for the high efficiency, carbon separation and internal reforming capabilities of solid oxide fuel cell systems”

“…We agree with Dr. Brouwer's enthusiasm in his recent Letter [1] for the enormous potential of SOFCs for electricity production, especially in a carbon-constrained world. We share his hope that this technology will be developed and demonstrated at the large scale.…”

Electrolytic effect in solid oxide fuel cells running on steam/methane mixture

“…External reforming requires additional fuel processing units for methane steam reforming and water gas shift (WGS) reactions, thus increasing the system's overall cost and complexity [29][30][31][32][33][34][35]. For comparison, direct internal reforming (DIR) eliminates the need of an external reformer as the high working temperature enables DIR reaction as well as WGS reaction for H 2 production [36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52]. Thus the SOFC system can be simpler and compact.…”

“…In addition to the development of new anode materials, one common way of tackling the carbon deposition problem is to supply sufficient amount of steam in the anode. Based on thermodynamic analysis in the literature, the steam-carbon ratio of no less than 2.0 is usually recommended in order to avoid carbon formation [28,42]. In this study, the performance of a planar SOFC running on H 2 O/CH 4 mixture is investigated with a 2D numerical model.…”