Direct Oxidation of Waste Vegetable Oil in Solid Oxide Fuel Cells

Abstract

Solid oxide fuel cells with ceria, ceria-Cu, and ceria-Rh anode were demonstrated to generate stable electric power with waste vegetable oil through direct oxidation of the fuel. The only pre-treatment to the fuel was a filtration to remove particulates. The performance of the fuel cell was stable over 100 hours for the waste vegetable oil without dilution. The generated power was up to 0.25 W/cm2 for ceria-Rh fuel cell. This compares favorably with previously studied hydrocarbon fuels including jet fuels and Pennsylvania crude oil.

Direct oxidation of waste vegetable oil in solid-oxide fuel cells

“…This is very crucial to the stability of power generation in the fuel cell that has Rh in its anode, as most precious metal catalysts are susceptible to sulfur poisoning. Ceria-Rh fuel cell did not operate for long on a jet fuel that contained 475 ppm sulfur [18].…”

“…5 and 7, as well as some of our unpublished work on jet fuel. More detailed discussions on this issue will be presented separately [18]. Electric power of about 250 mW cm −2 was generated on the ceria-Rh fuel cell stably over 100 h. Both the voltage and the current density were steady without significant oscillations.…”

Lanthanum strontium vanadate in solid oxide fuel cells.

“…They developed a method for high temperature sintering of electrolyte and low temperature sintering of electrode (Park et al, 2001). (diluted by N 2 ) 0.1 (Kim et al, 2001) Vegetable oil 0.06 (Zhou et al, 2007)…”