Title: Improving a solid oxide fuel cell system through exergy analysis

Authors: Shuangqiao Yang

Addresses: Division of Fuel cell and Energy Technology, Ningbo Institute of Material Technology and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 519 Zhuangshi Road, Ningbo 315201, China

Abstract: Solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) at system level attracts increasing interest due to commercial application requirements. In this paper, we have built a SOFC system using AspenPlus^TM. The system incorporates a SOFC macromodel with a set fuel utilisation of 0.5 and the component parameters are mainly based on experiments. The exergy analysis of the system based on simulation results give an electrical exergy efficiency ∼37.5%. In order to improve the performance of the system, two system modification methods, cascading additional stack and recycling anode exit gas, were evaluated by constructing double stack (DS) system and recycling anode gas (RAG) system. The exergy analysis gives an electrical exergy efficiency of ~55% for both systems, but the DS system requires higher cost while the RAG system needs more stable SOFC stack. The sensitivity of current density and operation temperature was also evaluated and the RAG system has better performance.

Keywords: solid oxide fuel cells; SOFC macromodels; exergy analysis; electrical efficiency; current density; operation temperature; simulation; exergy efficiency; AspenPlus^TM.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEX.2016.079308

International Journal of Exergy, 2016 Vol.21 No.3, pp.295 - 314

Received: 22 Dec 2015
Accepted: 05 Apr 2016
Published online: 26 Sep 2016 *

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