Ammonia-to-Power

A considerable high amount of ammonium (in the form of Nitrogen salts) is available in various waste product streams such as industrial wastewater, municipal sewage or digestate. Due to lack of efficient resource recovery technologies, the ammonium bound hydrogen in waste products cannot be utilized.

The project “Ammonia-to-Power” provides an innovative solution for different industrial applications, for economical and energy efficient recovery and energy recovery of ammonia present in liquid waste products.

Both these problems are addressed in the present project, the efficient recovery of ammonia gas and the utilization and energy recovery of ammonia in a fuel cell requires the development of new appropriate technologies.

Within the project “Ammonia-to-power” a vacuum membrane distillation method (MD) for ammonia gas extraction and an ammonia fuel cell (SOFC ammonia) are developed. Using the vacuum membrane distillation technology, liquid ammonia present in waste water will be attempted to be extracted as ammonia gas. The SOFC fuel cell is the only known technology with which it is possible to efficiently recover energy from extracted ammonia gas.

The outcome of the project will be an optimized membrane distillation plant at laboratory scale with precise knowledge of process parameters such as flow rates, temperature level, energy consumption, etc. Furthermore, an optimized and characterized vacuum membrane module will be developed using the most suitable operating parameters.

The separated ammonia will be converted into electrical and thermal energy using SOFC. For this a 5kW SOFC CHP system exclusively operating with ammonia as fuel will be developed. At the laboratory scale plant the optimal operating parameters of the fuel cell will be determined. The combined use of electricity and heat yields very high efficiencies, the use of fuel cells allows high electrical efficiencies in the low kW power range.

Furthermore a technical concept of a real-scale plant for two specific applications (municipal sewage treatment plant and ASFINGA highway rest stop) is elaborated. On the basis of the concepts a techno-economic evaluation of the new technology will be done.