A novel integrated gas-cooled fast nuclear reactor and vanadium chloride thermochemical cycle for sustainable fuel production
Muhammad Ishaq, İbrahim Dinçer
Abstract
The continuous growth of anthropogenic carbon emissions from the aviation industry has emphasized the urgent request to substitute traditional aviation fuels with Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAFs) because SAFs can potentially reduce carbon emissions by around 50-90% as compared to traditional kerosene-based fuels. In this paper, a novel SAF production pathway has been developed which is based on biomass processing, nuclear energy, and thermochemical reactions of the vanadium chloride cycle for SAF, clean power, and hydrogen production. The entire system is assessed thermodynamically in terms of energy and exergy performances. Various sensitivity analyses are computed to determine the reliable operating parameters. The study concludes that biomass-to-SAF energetic and exergetic performance was achieved to be approximately 76.72% and 74.35%. The energetic and exergetic performance values, through efficiencies, of the V-Cl cycle were calculated to be around 68.08% and 53.50%, respectively. For hydrogen production and storage, an energy penalty of around 16.83 kJ/kg H2 was calculated, which results in an efficiency penalty of around 6.18%. The overall energetic and exergetic efficiencies of the proposed integrated system were found to be around 59.79% and 23.78%, respectively.