OP-II-3

OP-III-B-5DemonstratorThe medium-term stable catalyst formulation described above was then incorporatedinto a modular demonstrator (see Fig.1). The energy required to drive the endothermicdehydrogenation reaction was foreseen to originate from the combustion of fuel cellanode off-gas and kerosene in a future technical process. Thus the modules of thedemonstrator had a plate heat-exchanger design composed of layers for energy supplycarrying micro-structured heating channels, which were fed with hot gas and reactionlayers and carried catalyst coated onto aluminium foam modules.Fig. 1 Hot gas driven de-hydrogenation reactorUp to 18 L/h kerosene werefed into the reactor and themaximum flow rate of hydrogenproduced exceeded 100 L/h. It isto the authors’ knowledge the firstprototype partial dehydrogenationreactor for fuel cell applications ofthat size presented in openliterature.Besides the hydrogen product, light hydrocarbons such as ethylene andpropylene were detected in the gaseous product, in concentrations between a fewhundred ppm and 2 Vol.% depending on the reaction conditions. Such by-productswould require additional purification steps because they would poison at least PEMfuel cell anodes.AcknowledgementThe work presented here was funded by Airbus Deutschland GmbH and the German Ministry ofEconomics and Technology in the scope of the project ELFA-BREZEN as part of the nationalaerospace research program.References[1] Kolb, G.; Fuel Processing for Fuel Cells, 1 Ed.; Wiley-VCH, Weinheim (2008).189