Balance of Plant Optimisation

Fuel cells (FCs) represent a very promising energy conversion technology, which is currently in demonstration and approaching the pre-commercial stage in some early market applications. Nevertheless, large investments in R&D and demonstration trials are still required before widespread market uptake of FC technologies can be achieved.
Dantherm Power (DTP) is currently heading two EUDP funded projects: USDan and SIMBA (see annex 1.5), and this BoP-OP (Balance of Plant Optimisation) project builds on the preliminary (and expected) results of these projects. In the USDan project next generation of reformer of the initial 1 kWel fuel cell based micro combined heat and power unit is being developed, and the SIMBA project will accelerate the volume production of small environmentally friendly and energy efficient fuel cell systems with reformer technology.In this BoP-OP project the partners are working on the development of a 2.5 kW platform targeting the micro CHP and supplemental market.
The success of the deployment of the system relies on mature core technology, solid integrationand good BOP-OP components. During the EUDP project Danish Micro CHP Phase 1, DTP has identified issues, which represent barriers towards commercialisation. Most of the failures seen during the field trial (128,000 hours on 20 systems) were related to BOP components and more precisely their interaction with each other. Therefore the work in this project will be divided between the identification of the failure mode and the identification of the appropriate cost effective solution. Further there will be work related to the reduction of the cost of ownership by reducing the capital cost and operating cost.
Therefore the overall objective of this project proposal is to conduct 8 work packages, which should lead to:
♦ Reduction in cost of ownership by reducing capital and operating cost
♦ Maintaining the level of performance and improving lifetime
♦ Improvement of the availability rate by reducing the downtime due to system incoherence.
The micro combined heat and power system developed in this project will be fed by natural gas or LPG. The hydrocarbon fuel will be converted through a fuel processor into a hydrogen rich and low CO content reformate fuel (70% vol hydrogen and less than 5 ppm vol CO). Hydrogen then flows to a reformate tolerant PEM fuel cell stack that produces DC current. Finally the DC power is inverted, synchronized and injected into the grid. Field trial of the DTP 1 kW system has led to the conclusion that the balance of components has some interactions, which could lead to systems’ premature failure. These trials have also shown that significant parts of the BoP-OP need to be optimised in order to become a commercial success.