High temperature solid oxide fuel cell integrated with autothermal reformer

As Thailand is a world-leading agricultural country which has a strong capability to produce ethanol by fermentation process from biomass, this study focused on power generation by high temperature solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) integrated with autothermal reformer (ATR). SOFC is operated at high temperature, 1200 K, which is an advantage of SOFC system because of the waste heat recovery from SOFC being used to force fuel processing and suitable for integration with gas turbine to generate additional electricity. In this study, the effect of water-gas shift (WGS) reactor on the system efficiency has been investigated. The integrated process of autothermal reformer and SOFC was thermodynamically studied. The combination of ATR-WGS-SOFC and GT was found to improve the overall efficiency and electric power of system.