(17a) Plasma Catalyzed JP-5 Reformer Scaleup for Navy Shipboard Fuel Cell Systems

The US Navy is studying various options of incorporating distributed power generation using fuel cells onboard future generations of warships. Currently, one of the major barriers to adoption of distributed shipboard power generation using fuel cells is the size and complexity of the fuel processing system. Ceramatec has shown promising results with its GlidArc plasma reformer successfully reforming JP-8 at the 5kW-10kW scale. The Office of Naval Research has supported the scaling of this technology to the 60kW scale. Due to our background as an SOFC developer, Ceramatec has long been a strong proponent of exploiting the high system efficiencies that can be obtained by thermal and process integration of the reformer and SOFC compared with standalone POx reformers. However in this case, the Navy has not committed to the selection of an SOFC as the platform for their shipboard power system. Therefore, the Ceramatec 60kW JP-5 reformer was designed to allow the flexibility of testing the reformer in modes compatible with either a high temperature fuel cell integrated configuration or a low temperature fuel processing integrated configuration. The 60kW test article design, fabrication and operational results will be presented.