Hydrogen from JP8

Unitel Technologies of Mt. Prospect, Illinois, has designed and built a fully automated computer-controlled pilot plant for making fuel cell hydrogen from JP8. Following mechanical tests at Unitel, this unit will be shipped this month to the U.S. Army Communications Electronics Command at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.

The U.S. Army Fuel Cell Technology Team at Fort Belvoir intends to use the Unitel system to fine tune the process for converting a logistical fuel into hydrogen to operate a solid oxide fuel cell stack. The end objective is to generate “quiet power” on the battlefield. Mobile applications of the technology include auxiliary power units on trucks and other military vehicles.

Unitel’s pilot unit produces 20 standard liters of hydrogen per minute, enough to generate approximately 975 watts of fuel cell power. The system includes two gas delivery modules (air and nitrogen) and two liquid delivery modules (JP8 and water). All four feeds are controlled and monitored by the computer. The outgoing products are also continuously measured and integrated, thus capturing all the data required for making exceptionally tight mass balance calculations. The actual JP8-to-hydrogen conversion takes place inside a catalytic auto-thermal reactor made of Alloy 625. The computer system provided by Unitel uses the iFix process control package from GE Fanuc. The pilot plant’s architecture makes it easy to “play with the parameters” to optimize the underlying process.