SOFC System Operating Strategies for Mobile Applications

Abstract

SOFC systems, working at high temperatures of about 800 °C, have recently attracted significant interest for application as automotive and stationary power supply systems, based on gasoline or diesel heating. For periodically changing operation, the thermal management of the system, including start‐up and load following capability, is considered a crucial point. In this work, the thermal behaviour during start‐up, operation, shut down, and restart of a simple SOFC system for mobile applications is studied. Different operating strategies, such as keeping the system at operating temperature and thermal cycling, are investigated and compared with respect to heat management, energy consumption, and start‐up performance. The characteristics depend on the system size and weight. For a 50 kWel system, with suitable insulation, immediate restart of the vehicle should be achievable for up to three days, hence no external heat is needed within that period of time. Smaller systems, e.g., Auxiliary Power supply Units (APU), replacing the conventional alternator in vehicles, cool down more rapidly. If an immediate restart is desirable ‘keeping the system at temperature’ would be the more favourable strategy.

Performance comparison between partial oxidation and methane steam reforming processes for solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) micro combined heat and power (CHP) system

“…4. This approach is recognized in the literature by [25] which also give a complete analysis of the heat losses of a SOFC hot box.…”

The Development and Application of a Novel Optimisation Strategy for Solid Oxide Fuel Cell‐Gas Turbine Hybrid Cycles

“…Inevitably, part of the thermal energy produced in the SOFC is directly released as heat leak to the environment [8,43,45,46], which can be expressed as [47] …”

Operating Point Optimization of a Hydrogen Fueled Hybrid Solid Oxide Fuel Cell-Steam Turbine (SOFC-ST) Plant

“…In this way, on the one hand, models based on distributed parameters allow a detailed analysis of the geometry and operating conditions of the stack [34,35]. On the other hand, control-oriented lumped models can be found in the literature in which it is assumed that all the SOFC has a unique temperature [36][37][38].…”