System development and self-sustainability analysis for upgrading human waste to power

Design, Construction, and Testing of a Gasifier-Specific Solid Oxide Fuel Cell System

“…The SOFC system was developed to be integrated with a plasma gasifier and a gas cleanup unit ( Figure 1) at TU Delft. Prior to determining the system configuration, TU Delft performed a thermodynamic analysis of the power plant in which two suitable configurations for the SOFC system were evaluated [22]. The main difference in the configurations was the mechanism for suppressing carbon formation.…”

“…The major difference between the system configurations in the study of Liu et al [22] is the technique employed for suppressing carbon formation. One system uses steam produced in a heat recovery steam generator unit that is mixed with the anode flow before it enters the SOFC module, whereas the other uses a catalytic partial oxidation unit (CPOx) to suppress carbon formation and pre-reform some of the hydrocarbons before it enters the SOFC module.…”

“…The flue gas subsequently moves to the dryer and is used to pre-dry the feedstock that is fed to the gasifier. Previous results suggest that the system configuration with a CPOx unit could achieve higher electrical efficiency [22]. As this unit also increases the flexibility in terms of thermal integration, it was selected for construction.…”

Microwave-Driven Plasma Gasification for Biomass Waste Treatment at Miniature Scale

“…In a collaborative effort on the development of the aforementioned project on processing of human 115 waste materials, Liu at al. [29] present a system integration study of a small-scale ~10 kW fuel gas 116 output plasma gasifier integrated with a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) stack, a pre-treatment stage for 117 drying and grinding, and a gas cleaning stage to prepare the syngas for the SOFC. It is shown by 118 means of simulation that such a combined system for decentralized treatment of human waste may 119 indeed form an energetically self-sustained process, which would enable the objective of developing a 120 small-scale processing facility for sanitation waste that is non-reliant on pre-existing infrastructures 121 (i.e.…”

Oxidation of H2, CO and syngas mixtures on ceria and nickel pattern anodes

“…Present efforts are directed towards developing anode materials capable of operating with hydrocarbon fuels without carbon deposition [2][3][4]. As different types of anodes have their own advantages, it is important to compare the anodes for the type of fuel and application under consideration Following our previous work on gasifier SOFC gas turbine systems development [1,[5][6][7][8][9][10], in this study we compare the performance of different anode materials when fed with H 2 , CO and syngas. The traditional cermet anode is a porous three dimensional structure with metallic and ionic phases heterogeneously mixed making reactions difficult to localise.…”