Papers presented to the 11th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, South Africa, 20-23 July 2015.
With dwindling energy resources which earth is having in the
form of fossil fuels, today there is a scrupulous requirement of
venturing alternative avenues, which can eventually share the
ever-increasing energy demand. Solar photovoltaic is a reliable
and clean source of energy. However due to its intermittent
nature, it is vital to integrate solar photovoltaic with other
sources of energy. Fuel cell technology because of its inherent
environment friendly behavior has been an option that can
fulfill this requirement. Present study deals with exploring the
design challenges of integrating hydrogen fuel cell with solar
photovoltaic. The continuous supply of hydrogen as fuel can be
met in a safer and reliable manner through solid state storage of
metal hydride system, with the hydrogen generated through an
electrolyzer utilizing the PV (Photovoltaic) electricity. The
challenges lie in dealing with the high-end exothermic reaction
that occurs in the process of storing hydrogen in the metal
hydride and the endothermic reaction that occurs in the process
of extracting hydrogen. Therefore designing of an adequate
cooling and heating arrangement for metal hydride storage
system is also very important from efficient energy utilization point of view. Thermodynamic analysis of this cooling and
heating circuit is reported for making an energy efficient
PV/FC (Photovoltaic-fuel cell) system. The metal hydride unit
is thermodynamically analyzed to critically ascertain the
performance of the chiller that extracts the exothermic heat
generation of the hydrides for the hydrogen storage to occur
and the heater to achieve the reverse action. Several candidate
approaches ranging from a simple back of the envelope
calculations to sophisticated conjugate heat transfer analysis
using CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) techniques are
utilized to analyze the system. For the range of parameters
considered, the study estimated the chiller and heater
requirements of 250 W and 500 W respectively.
