Investigation of steam reforming of tar for integrated exergy recuperative biomass gasification and SOFC system

Recently, a super integrated gasification fuel cell (S-IGFC) system has been proposed to achieve efficient electric power generation from fuels such as biomass and coal. In this system, no combustion, which provides large exergy loss, takes place. Furthermore, exothermic heat and steam from a fuel cell are supplied to a gasifier based on exergy recuperation, leading to high energy efficient power generation. To use exothermic heat from the fuel cell (SOFC) as reaction heat in the gasifier, fuels must be gasified under 1200 K. Simultaneously, most of syngas must be converted to hydrogen to be fed into SOFC for power generation. It is well-known that a series of reactions mainly composed of pyrolysis and steam gasification are taken place in the gasifier. Moreover, a plenty of tar is produced accompanying pyrolysis in a case of biomass gasification, which has large exergy. To keep the high energy efficiency of the system, it is necessary to convert this large exergy of tar to hydrogen. In this research, we investigated the steam reforming of tar to hydrogen with exothermic heat from SOFC by experiments and examined the potential of the overall system performance to propagate S-IGFC system to the society.