Comparative Evaluation of Combined Power Systems having SOFC-HAT and SOFC-HAT-CO2 Power Cycle

Abstract

Comparative evaluation of solid oxide fuel cell-humid air turbine based combined power system and the solid oxide fuel cell-humid air turbine-supercritical carbon dioxide based power system is presented in this paper. The study focuses on the effective utilization of the available waste heat in solid oxide fuel cell by integrating it with other power generation options. The integration of solid oxide fuel cell and humid air turbine offers the opportunity for effective energy utilization leading to the performance improvement of the combined system as compared to only solid oxide fuel cell. Another possibility to increase the utilization of the available exhaust heat is by combining the solid oxide fuel cell-humid air turbine and supercritical carbon dioxide based cycle for the performance enhancement. This work relates to the thermodynamic modeling for energy analysis of the distinctive power generation options. The parametric investigation has been carried out for the varying cycle pressure ratio, turbine inlet temperature, fuel utilization factor and humidity ratio on the output parameters namely work output and efficiency. Results show that the work output increases by 4.54 % when the SOFC-HAT cycle is integrated with sCO2 cycle. Paper presents the implication of independent parameters on the dependant parameters in graphical form.