Articles
Around 40 micro combined-heat-and-power (mCHP) domestic appliances are to be installed in homes in the UK and mainland Europe as the second phase of a €10.3 million project aimed at bringing down the cost of distributed energy technology.
The mCHP units comprise a ceramic solid-oxide fuel cell fed by natural gas, creating about 1.5kW of electricity and 700W of heat on a constant basis. Tests have shown that the system from Ceramic Fuel Cells produces electricity with a net efficiency of 60%.
“The fuel cell reforms methane in the natural gas to hydrogen to produce electricity,” said Adrian Waddington, project manager at Ideal Heating, one of the partners overseeing trials on the SOFT-PACT project, part EU funded by the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking.
“And instead of dumping waste heat to air, it is captured via a unique twin-tank thermal store to provide hot water or central heating.”
The mCHP system also has an integrated condensing boiler that would provide heating at periods of high demand, said Waddington. The appliance can be installed into existing domestic systems, employing a conventional line gas supply, and does not require an external hydrogen infrastructure.
The integration of the unit into a domestic property should be relatively straightforward, said Waddington, as it could simply replace a boiler that has come to the end of its natural life. The associated equipment, radiators, valves and pipework would remain the same, he added.
The appliance is being touted as a smart technology, coming with an integrated embedded computer, provided by Dutch IT firm HOMA, that feeds information back to a secure server over the internet.
The end user/utility company can check the website to make more informed decisions around the efficient operation of the appliance.
Waddington added: “The efficiency of the electricity generated by a distributed mCHP appliance is significantly higher than a conventional centralised energy supply, providing significant carbon emission reduction over conventional electrical generation and heating technologies through the removal of transmission losses and efficiency in energy conversion.”
Waddington said that the biggest engineering challenge on the project had been combining the fuel cell, supplemental boiler, thermal store, and associated equipment in a small enough package for a domestic environment.
“We have also put in a lot of work to optimise the waste heat recovery performance of the system,” he said.
The SOFT-PACT trials will run until 2015, with utility firm E.On installing and monitoring the devices and reporting back to the consortium on the system’s performance.