EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF THE PERFORMANCE OF 10KWE NON-CATALYTIC DIESEL AUTOTHERMAL REFORMER FOR MARINE FUEL CELL SYSTEM APPLICATIONS

Diesel autothermal reforming is useful in many strategic applications, where high energy density logistic fuels such as JP-8 diesel are reformed on-board to a hydrogen-rich syngas, which is further treated to be used as fuelin a fuel cell stack to produce electricity and waste heat. However, JP-8 and diesel generally contain sulfur, which precludes the use of most catalytic reforming techniques in field applications. Moreover, low efficiency, propensity for coke formation and reliability concerns need to be addressed before wide acceptance. The goal of this studyis to explore the performance of a 10kW<inf>e</inf> non-catalytic diesel reformer at reactant mixture conditions and to demonstrate the practicality of producing H<inf>2</inf> via non-catalytic autothermal reforming as an alternative to catalytic reforming. While we have achieved reformer efficiencies of up to 54% and carbon conversion efficienciesof88%, a further improvements in these efficiencies can be achieved once a few remaining challenges related to fuel mixing and flame propagation are addressed.