Determination of safe operation zone for an intermediate-temperature solid oxide fuel cell and gas turbine hybrid system

This paper proposes a novel approach to determine the safe zone for an intermediate-temperature solid oxide fuel cell and gas turbine hybrid system. The approach first ensures the compressor safety and then determines the overall system safe zone by analyzing the unsafe characteristics of main components. Safe performance of the hybrid system fueled with biomass gas at all operations is analyzed. Finally, the map of safe zone is obtained to avoid component malfunctions and system performance deterioration. Results show that the hybrid system can achieve a high efficiency 60.78%, which is an interesting reference for distributed power stations. Under all operations, two unbalanced energy zones exist, which may cause the short supply of O₂ or fuel for electrochemical reaction. The lower the rotational speed of gas turbine, the narrower the zone of carbon deposition takes place in the reformer or turbine inoperation caused by too low inlet temperature. However, the phenomenon of fuel cell thermal cracking due to over-temperature will be exacerbated. System layout also affects component safety especially for the fuel cell. In the safe zone, the system has a characteristic of high efficiency and low load with low rotational speed, vice versa. In other words, the powers and load adjustment ranges both decrease with decreasing rotational speed whereas the efficiency increases, which peaks at 63.43%.