Improving a solid oxide fuel cell system through exergy analysis
by Shuangqiao Yang
International Journal of Exergy (IJEX), Vol. 21, No. 3, 2016

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.

Online publication date: Mon, 26-Sep-2016

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