Waste heat recovery of a flame-assisted fuel cell using carbon dioxide supercritical Brayton cycle

The flame fuel cell is a new type of solid oxide fuel cell in which the solid oxide fuel cell is integrated with a rich fuel flame to generate power. In this paper, a flame-assisted solid oxide fuel cell is employed to generate power, and the cell is simulated in EES. The model includes the equations of mass, energy, and chemical and electrochemical reactions. Parametric analysis of the fuel cell shows that by increasing the equivalence ratio from 1.2 to 2.8, the fuel cell efficiency changes from 4.21% to 18.23%. In this study, the supercritical Brayton carbon dioxide cycle is used to recover the waste heat of the cell. To optimize this thermal cycle, the compressor pressure ratio and flow split fraction have been considered. In the optimal pressure ratio, efficiencies for turbine inlet temperatures of 583.15 K, 823.15 K and 923.15 K have been obtained as 31.56%, 47.95% and 52.69% for the pressure ratio parameter, respectively. The results reveal that the efficiency of the integrated cycle is improved and reached from 18.23% to 26.95% for Φ = 2.8