Performance assessment of a power/refrigeration cogeneration system driven by the waste heat of a solid oxide fuel cell

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Mechanical Engineering Department, Ayatollah Boroujerdi University, Boroujerd, Iran

10.22104/hfe.2023.6184.1260

Abstract

In the present study, combination of a solid oxide fuel cell with two CCP subsystem to generate power and refrigeration is investigated. The proposed system consists of two combined ORC-VCR system which their input energy is supplied by the waste heat of a SOFC. The energy and exergy analysis is carried out for the system components. The results indicate that recovering the waste heat of the SOFC, the energy and exergy efficiencies are improved by 45.82% and 6.14% compared to the standalone SOFC system. Besides, the proposed system can generate 382.4kW power and 176.28kW refrigeration, respectively. Moreover, the exergy analysis demonstrates that the air heat exchanger, afterburner, SOFC stack and evaporatorI have considerable exergy destruction rate in comparison with other system components. The effect of key parameters of the SOFC and ORC-VCR subsystems on the system performance are also analyzed. The results revealed that SOFC net power and refrigeration capacity increase with increasing current density. Furthermore, by increasing the SOFC operating temperature, the refrigeration capacity increases. However, there is an optimum value for the fuel cell operating temperature in which the SOFC net power is maximum.

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