Fuel Cell Energy Field Sites

United States Fuel Cell Energy is developing an externally manifolded internally reformed MCFC and has constructed a 17 MWe/year cell manufacturing plant. They have also constructed a 400 kWe test facility. They have successfully completed the manufacture and test of 16 stack (4 modules), 2 MWe test in Santa Clara, California, for 4,000 hours. Details on Fuel Cell Energy field site are found in Table 11-5. 

Table 11-5 Fuel Cell Energy Field Sites... 

This section of the handbook contains field site information. Most of the worldwide summaries were extracted from an lEA paper. Information on the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Fuel Cell Demonstration was taken from the following web site www.dodfuelcell.com. Finally, Fuel Cell Energy, IFC, and Siemens Westinghouse provided information on their field sites. The IFC PAFC summary includes a number of projects reported by DoD. In the DoD demonstration program, a total of 30 PAFC units were installed at DoD sites across the United States. These were model B and C PC-25 units. 

Plug Power, Inc, of Latham, NY manufactured six alpha fuel cells to be field tested as part of the Clean Energy Initiative, the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA), Uniondale, NY. Hofstra University was the site of the first tests, which began in February 2000. By the 60-day mark, the fuel cells had generated approximately 1900 kWh and operated in parallel with LIPA s T D system. 

Sulzer Hexis started its SOFC development in 1989 [53,54], In the period 1989-1997, two proof-of-concept systems were demonstrated in Winterthur, Switzerland, at Sulzer Hexis facilities and in Dortmund, Germany (Dortmund Energy and Water utility company DEW). This proof-of-concept phase was followed by a field test on six customer sites in Switzerland, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain and Germany. Together, these field test units accumulated 65,600 operating hours. The field test phase was finished in 2000 and currently the market entry phase has started. Sulzer Hexis has orders for more than 400 of its HXS 1000 Premiere fuel cell units. The customers are utility companies, mainly located in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Systems will be delivered from 2003 onward [55], Sulzer Hexis expects to sell 10,000 units in 2005 and to increase annual sales to 260,000 units by 2010. 

Computer experiments particularly use quantum chemical approaches that provide accurate result with intense computational cost. Classical or semiempirical methods on the other hand are able to simulate thousands or up to millions of atoms of a system with pairwise Lennard-Jones (LJ)-type potentials [104-107]. Thus, LJ-type potentials are very accurate for inert gas systems [108], whereas they are unable to describe reactions or they do so by predetermined reactive sites within the molecules of the reactive system [109]. van Duin and coworkers [109-115] developed bond-order-dependent reactive force field technique is called ReaxFF as a solution to the aforementioned problems. Therefore, ReaxFF force field is intended to simulate reactions. They are successfully implemented to study hydrocarbon combustion [112,115,116] that is based on C-H-0 combustion parameters, fuel cell [110,111], metal oxides [117-122], proteins [123,124], phosphates [125,126], and catalyst surface reactions and nanotubes [110-113] based on ReaxFF water parameters [127]. Bond order is the number of chemical bonds between a pair of atoms that depends only on the number and relative positions of other atoms that they interact with [127]. Parameterization of ReaxFFs is achieved using experimental and quantum mechanical data. Therefore, ReaxFF calculations are fairly accurate and robust. The total energy of the molecule is calculated as the combination of bonded and nonbonded interaction energies. 

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