ABSTRACT
Currently, there is a lot of interest in developing power sources in the 10-100W range for portable power applications (Kundu et al., 2007; Service, 2002). One promising approach involves the use of a reformer that produces hydrogen from a hydrocarbon source, coupled with a fuel cell stack that utilizes the hydrogen to produce power. Such a device can be used to power radios, computers, electronic displays, and small unmanned air vehicles (National Research Council, 2004; Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2005). There are a variety of commonly available hydrocarbons such as methane, methanol, propane,
butane, gasoline, and diesel that can be used for reforming reactants to produce hydrogen. For instance, Pattekar and Kothare (2005) fabricated a radial flow micro packed-bed reactor via deep reactive ion etching that utilizes methanol to generate sufficient hydrogen for a 20W power application. Shah andBesser (2008) developed an integrated siliconmicro reactor basedmethanol steam reformer that produces sufficient hydrogen for 0.38W of power. Mu et al. (2007) fabricated a miniature reformer that utilizes methanol to produce sufficient hydrogen to generate 100W of power in a fuel cell stack.While there is considerable literature on fabrication of micro-reformers that demonstrates the feasibility of utilizing methanol to produce hydrogen for micro and smallscale applications, there are few papers in modeling and analysis of these reactors, which are necessary for optimizing performance.
