Team Forming by drawing lots
(1) Due - noon, Apr. 1 (Thu)
(2) Elect team leader
(3) Team leaders should get consent of term project title then email to instructor for the team registration
(4) Late registration is for a demerit in Final team score
Presentation submission due : untill the prior day noon of your presentation
15 min of presentation + 5 min of discussion
2:20 PM ~ 3:20 PM, Apr. 29 (Thu) ----- Team A, B, D
2:00 PM ~ 3:20 PM, May 04 (Tue) ----- Team E, F, G, H, C
Design your own Fuel Cell
for example;
(1) Field of its application
and engineering requirements
(2) Selection of Fuel, oxidizer
- background of selection and logistics
(3) Electro-chemical reaction
(4) Description of design and structure
(5) Characteristic features compared to other types of power generation or storage
(6) Expected benefit to use the selected system
(7) Conclusion
Team - B : Powering UIUC Campus Buildings with Direct Ethanol Fuel Cells Using Bioethanol Derived from Corn
Our team will be designing a Direct Ethanol Fuel Cell (DEFC) system that will be capable of providing power to (one or more) buildings located on the UIUC campus. The Illinois Climate Action Plan (iCAP) is a University-wide cooperative effort to create a carbon-neutral campus by the year 2050, and our project is one potential solution that could help the campus attain this iCAP target. Our team found data published by UIUC Facilities and Services for FY2020 which breaks down the electrical energy consumption by every single building for the year 2020. Using this, can identify the top buildings on campus, ranked by their energy usage intensity, and we can design a DEFC system capable of supplying 100% of the electricity requirements for these buildings. In doing so, we will calculate things such as DEFC power requirement and fuel storage volume, and we will determine the optimal way to transport/store our fuel. Additionally, we will investigate the economic viability of this system design by estimating the cost of producing bioethanol from corn and comparing it to the present cost of electricity as derived from current energy resource mix. We feel that this aligns with the heart of UIUC’s research focuses in agriculture and bioenergy. We will estimate: the amount of corn crop land necessary to supply sufficient ethanol to power our DEFC system, the costs of producing ethanol and implementing this DEFC system, and the net reduction in carbon emissions that could potentially result from this project.
In this design project, we are thinking about the utilization of regenerative fuel cells coupled with solar panel technology to recharge and covert water to its elementary form, hydrogen and oxygen gas, which can be used as fuel for the hydrogen fuel cell to provide power for the moon base and all its operation needs. This overall fuel cell design concept is currently being researched upon and seems to be a promising idea and soliton to the task at hand.
The fuel here will be hydrogen and the oxidizer will be atmospheric air and we are looking for the fuel cell system to provide a maximum of roughly 1 MW of power to a microgrid in the case of grid power outages or lack of renewable resources (in the future).
we intend to design a fuel cell which will be used in heavy machinery to replace the gasoline starter engine which is often found coupled to the main diesel engine, providing the initial compression required for startup. We believe that this could not only prove to be environmentally and economically impactful, but could also increase awareness and feasibility for the introduction of fuel cells into the heavy machinery industry. Fuel cell use could further be expanded through the replacement of hydraulic system engines, as well as the long term goal of completely replacing the diesel dependency with a heavy duty fuel cell system.
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