Volume 31: Clean Energy Technologies towards Carbon Neutrality

Process integration and heat exchanger network synthesis for a methanol-reforming proton exchange membrane fuel cell Zheng Liang, Yingzong Liang, Xianglong Luo, Jianyong Chen, Ying Chen

Abstract

The present study focuses on the heat integration of process streams for a methanol-reforming proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC). A Big-M method-based heat integration-PEMFC-heat exchanger network (HEN) synthesis model is established in the GAMS environment. The optimal operating condition and heat exchange topology structure of the PEMFC system integrated with methanol-reforming are obtained through the developed optimization method. Comparative analysis on two different energy utilization configurations is conducted. The PEMFC system with heat integration performs the reduction of 42.62% in operating cost.

Keywords heat integration, PEMFC, MSR, mixed-integer nonlinear programming, HEN synthesis