Hydrogen Fuel Cells

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Hydrogen owing to its abundance in universe is replacing the fossil energy sources like coal, petroleum etc that are being depleted speedily. Hydrogen is energetic per unit mass of fuel burned i.e. 120.7 kJ/g compared to any type of fuel (Haryanto et al., 2005). Moreover, fossil sources produce pollutants like COx, NOx, SOx, CxHx, soot, ash and other organic compounds to the atmosphere on burning that adds to the global warming. Hydrogen was discovered by Henry Cavendish in 1766 and named in 1783 by Antoine Lavoisier with origin of name from words "hydro" and "genes" meaning "water" and "generator" because it burns to produce water only (Song, 2003). It is present in combination to the other elements like with oxygen in water, with carbon in hydrocarbons and need to be extracted. Other sources can be a variety of fossil and non-fossil resources like coal, natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas, diesel, biomass and its derived fuels such as methanol, ethanol, and biodiesel (Haryanto et al., 2005).
Hydrogen fuel cells are used to provide energy for transport and mobile applications in form of electricity directly from chemical energy to power laptops, vehicles or other applications where cost is not a big issue like space technology, submarines etc. They are energy efficient, clean, fuel flexible, not noisy, vibrations are not there and they have smooth operation resulting in comfort of the users (Silveira et al., 2009). Moreover, fuel used in fuel cells has greater energy density than batteries (Park et al., 2007) which is required for portable applications like laptops, medical and telecommunication devices and for military applications like remote sensors (<20W), silent power generation and battery recharging (200W- 2kW) and mobil...

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...ry method of removal or addition of convective heat). So, the final "success" of this technology will depend largely on modeling, understanding and control of temperature excursions.
In this work, ethanol is steam reformed in a non-isothermal tubular reactor which is coupled with ethanol combustion in recuperative way where heat is transferred from the exothermic reaction zone through the walls of channel. A full three-dimensional geometry is modeled consisting of co-flow and counter-flow configurations. The authors have studied the design configurations based on ethanol steam reforming through one dimensional models and experiments (Table 2) but a 3-D model was required in order to fully explore the various transport processes in the configurations and study the variations in the reactor performance due to hydrodynamics and heat and mass transfer characteristics.

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