Evaluation of Water-Cooling Effect in Hydrogen-Fed SOFC for High-Efficiency Combined System Design

Abstract If pure hydrogen is used as a fuel in high-temperature fuel cells, waste heat must be removed by air cooling, which requires increased power consumption for supplying excess air. This study presents a hydrogen-fed solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) that uses water instead of air for stack cooling and improved system performance. A novel SOFC system with energy cascade utilization is also proposed using cooling water as the working fluid for a steam turbine. Water cooling for the SOFC stack cooling reduced the stack power and efficiency but significantly reduced the power consumption for supplying excess air by more than 60%. Under ambient SOFC operating pressure, the net power and efficiency of the proposed system were increased by 25.6% and 12.2%p compared to the air-cooled system, respectively. At an SOFC operating pressure of 1000 kPa, the proposed hybrid system with energy cascade utilization achieved improvements of 10.2% in net power and 7.5%p in net efficiency, leading to efficiency higher than 73%. This study is significant in that it proposes a novel high-efficiency SOFC system with energy cascade utilization by using two-phase water as a cooling medium and working fluid of steam turbine.