Download or read book Comparison Between Aqueous- and Vapor-phase Reformation for Thermochemical Waste Heat Recovery of Engine Exhaust Gas written by Mark Aaronian Severy and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natural gas internal combustion engines release over half of the fuel's energy as waste heat and emit pollution that harms human health and accelerates climate change. Enriching natural gas with hydrogen has been shown to mitigate these impacts by reducing emissions and increasing engine efficiency. Thermal energy in the exhaust gas from natural gas engines can be used to drive chemical reactions to reform a biomass-derived feedstock into a hydrogen-rich gas. This gas can be blended with the primary fuel to enhance combustion and displace some of the natural gas demand. Two types of chemical reformation processes, aqueous-phase reformation (APR) and vapor-phase reformation (VPR), have been identified which can convert a biomass-derived sugar feedstock solution into a hydrogen-rich gas by recovering waste heat from engine exhaust gas. VPR operates at higher temperatures than APR, which limits the amount of heat that can be transferred from the exhaust gas to the reaction temperature. This study used a thermodynamic pinch analysis to compare the performance of these two processes based on their respective process heat demands and the thermal energy available from engine exhaust gas to determine how many moles of feedstock can be reformed. The calculations were performed using specifications for eight natural gas engines with reactor conditions from fourteen APR and ten VPR experiments, using glycerol as a model compound.