Ethanol and glycerin processor systems coupled to solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs). Optimal operation and heat exchangers network synthesis

This paper is aimed at presenting a methodology for the simultaneous synthesis of solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) based systems and their associated heat exchangers network (HEN). The optimization model is formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear mathematical programming (MINLP) problem. The optimization goal is to maximize the overall net efficiency of the integrated system. l and glycerin are studied as fuels fed to the SOFC system as they constitute two renewable and sustainable sources of energy. n results, net global efficiency values of 69.35% and 66.97% were computed for ethanol and glycerin, respectively. For both cases, the computed optimal operation pressure, the SOFC operation temperature and the fed water/fuel molar ratio values were 2 atm, 1073 K and 3, respectively.