12. Fuel Cells and Battery Technology

With rising fossil fuel prices due to the Ukraine crisis, the worlds need energy sauces with safe, clean, and sustainable energy sources and do not rely solely on fossil energy to achieve carbon neutrality as adopted by the Paris Agreement. Therefore, our laboratory has developed a high-performance direct carbon fuel cell (HF-DCFC) consisting of molten salt gasification and a tubular molten carbonate fuel cell (T-MCFC). The previous studies clarified that as the HF-DCFC performance was greatly affected by the type of fuel and gasification agent gas conditions, operating conditions need to be optimized for each organic fuel. In addition, the conventional system required two systems, one for the cathode gas system and the other for the organic fuel and anode gas system, making it too large for an HF-DCFC system. If the cathode exhaust gas can be used as a gasification gas, cathode gas, and organic fuel are fed from the cathode gas supply port of the HF-DCFC, and H2 and CO are produced by the gasification reaction of the cathode exhaust gas and organic fuel at the anode side. These gases can be used as anode fuel to generate electricity in the HF-DCFC, and the system can be made more compact using a single gas system. Therefore, this study examined the effect of varying the cathode gas conditions in the T-MCFC on the gasification characteristics of wood pellets as fuel. As a result, because the highest hydrogen production occurred when the cathode gas composition was 70Air/30CO2, the standard for MCFCs, and the gas utilization ratio was 70%, which is higher than the standard condition, it was able to suggest that the cathode exhaust gas can be used as a gasifier gas.