In order to achieve efficiencies in excess of 70% in transportation-scale engines, a mixed combustion/electrochemical strategy was developed in which a piston engine is coupled to a downstream fuel cell by way of a catalytic reformer. The piston engine serves to reform the fuel and extract some work by operating in a fuel-rich regime, the catalytic reformer serves to catalytically reform the ex...

Fuel Cell–Gas Turbine (FC-GT) hybrid technology portends a significant breakthrough in electrical generation. Hybrid systems reach unprecedented high efficiencies, above 70% LHV in some instances, with little to no pollution, and great scalability. This work investigates two high temperature fuel cell types with potential for hybrid application ranging from distributed generation to central pla...

This paper describes design options and comparative results of new compressed air energy storage (CAES) technologies for electric utility applications. Results are based on a CAES technical scoping study for energy storage applications in the California grid. The results show that CAES allows less expensive night-time electric energy to be effectively stored and redelivered to the grid to repla...

Biomass is a key resource in a society based on renewable energy, but is a limited resource and the use of biomass in one sector will influence its availability for other sectors. The global energy system is heavily dependent on fossil fuels, and the climate impacts of CO2 occur regardless of the source of emissions. As a result, the climatic effects of biomass use in an energy system depend la...

Emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere will need to be greatly reduced to avoid the risk of harmful climate change. There are many different ways of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. It is important to be able to understand how the different options compare. This paper includes a comparison of the costs of three different options for reducing emissions of CO2; wind ...

We provide a detailed thermodynamic and economic analysis of two novel alternatives to the “standard” Shell coal IGCC with CO2 capture. In the first, the syngas coolers are replaced by a “partial water quench” where the raw syngas stream is cooled and humidified via direct injection of hot water. This design is less costly, but also less efficient. The second approach retains syngas coolers but...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is usually carried out using fixed coefficients for resource use and emissions as the basis for the calculation of the environmental impact of a product or a service. However, in agriculture, where the systems’ functioning largely depends on the dynamic organisation of agricultural practices and on variable climatic conditions, coupling dynamic simulation models with...

The integral equations encountered in boundary element methods are frequently solved numerically using collocation with spline trial functions. Convergence proofs and error estimates for these approximation methods have been only available in the following cases: Fredholm integral equations of the second kind [4], [7], one-dimensional pseudodifferential equations and singular integral equations...