Application Areas

Auxiliary Power Units (APU):

SOFCs can be employed in auxiliary power units (APU) for on-board generation of electricity on vehicles of any kind. The main scope for application is that of electricity supply while a vehicle is at a standstill, ranging from caravans stationed overnight to aircraft parked at an airport gate. An SOFC- based APU also improves electricity generation efficiency during the vehicles’s journeys and can supply back-up power during emergencies.

Many large vehicles run on diesel today, and SOFCs offers the advantage of being able to operate on diesel reformate without the necessity of further gas processing steps that would be required to purify the reformate to hydrogen. It is the ideal APU unit from a size of 500 W_el up to several tens of kW_el for road vehicles or even several hundreds of kW_el as required by aircraft and marine vessels.

The efficiency of electricity generation in board of vehicles, using a conventional generator coupled to the engine, is in the range of 10 to15% today. The system net efficiency of an SOFC APU could reach above 30%, which would more than double the power yield from the same amount of fuel. Additionally, on-site emission of diesel fumes, noise, and other pollutants would be reduced to near-zero. Utilization of the heat produced by the SOFC for heating or cooling (via absorption coolers, for instance) on the vehicles would further increased the overall efficiency.

 Stationary small scale combined heat and power (m-CHP):

Stationary small scale power plants are usually referred to as micro-CHP, which stands for residential-scale combined heat and power.

The great potential of this application lays in the fact that both power and heat for a household can be generated on the premises, from a single primary energy carrier, such as natural gas or LPG. This obviates transportation losses, and greatly enhances the utilization of these fuels, reducing waste. Each end-user thus becomes a producer as well, creating the opportunity to sell electricity when supply exceeds the household’s demand. This concept is known distributed or decentralized generation and is explained on the following figure.

As can be seen, considerable amounts of primary energy input can be saved by producing power on the spot and utilizing the excess heat for heating purposes, rather than relying on centralized production of power and separate heat generation.

Two main modalities can be distinguished of micro-CHP systems: those that obtain the fuel from the grid (e.g. natural gas) and those that work isolated from the grid (off-grid or stand-alone) thus having to store the fuel.

Thanks to the widespread availability of natural gas through the distribution grid, the grid-connected application has the potential to become very widespread, and the potential market – aiming in particular at the replacement of old household boilers – could be of several hundreds of thousands of system per year in Europe alone.

This part of the project is the most important because the concept of micro-CHP for household is associated at a several advantages, which:

• Cutting emissions of greenhouse gases
• Reduction of people’s number that lives in poor economic condition
• Reduction of the needs of transmission systems and distribution. How is known, is easy transport electricity but not heat, so with micro-CHP is possible decrease the cost of heat transport.
• Increasing of electricity and heat supply for customer
• Encourage and engage the consumer towards the use of these new technologies with high energy efficiency
• Auxiliary units of power
• Combination SOFC/SOEC for energetic conversation system