Adsorbents for Biogas Fueled Fuel Cells

Unlike internal combustion engines, fuel cells operate with very high efficiency even at small scale, offering significant benefits to distributed combined heat and power (CHP) systems utilizing bio-waste.  However, effective utilization of biogas in a fuel cell requires proper gas processing and removal of impurities.  It is well known that impurities in the biogas such as the sulfur can irreversibly adsorb on the anode catalysts and degrade the cell performance.  Hence, the sulfur content of the gas must be reduced to less than 0.1 ppmv. TDA Research Inc. (TDA) is developing a low-cost, high-capacity expendable sorbent that can remove both the H₂S and organic sulfur species in biogas to the ppb levels.  TDA’s sorbents can also be modified to simultaneously remove siloxanes. TDA is carrying out field demonstrations of our gas clean-up units integrated with biofueled fuel cells. The results will be presented in the meeting.