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Advanced Demonstration of a Carbonate Direct Fuel Cell Operating on HD-5 Propane

Client
U.S. Army ERDC-CERL

Point of Contact
Dave Moyer, Senior Mechanical Engineer
(814) 269-2578
moyerd@ctc.com

Project Summary
Concurrent Technologies Corporation (CTC), operators of the Department of Defense (DoD) Fuel Cell Test and Evaluation Center (FCTec), under contract to the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center - Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (ERDC-CERL) and in collaboration with FuelCell Energy (FCE), modified a FCE carbonate Direct Fuel Cell (DFC)-300 power plant to operate on natural gas as a primary fuel and HD-5 propane as a secondary fuel. The primary goal of this demonstration was to: (1) avoid carbon deposition during pre-reforming of propane to a methane rich gas, (2) meter and control propane flow to account for variations in fuel composition, (3) remove sulfur from the propane, and (4) increase the steam required for operation on propane. A secondary goal was to demonstrate rapid fuel switching from natural gas to propane while maintaining base load electricity generation.

The DFC power plant was demonstrated to operate on HD-5 propane successfully for over 3,350 hours, at high electrical efficiency ranging from 46.7 – 47.3% LVH over a large range of power outputs from 133 to 244 kW. The ability to rapidly switch between fuels while maintaining base load electricity generation was also successfully demonstrated at various loads during testing. This rapid fuel switch was demonstrated more than 40 times during operations. Testing validated the DFC the power plant’s capacity to guard against fuel supply interruptions from natural disasters or security issues at mission-critical facilities.

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