Behavior of SOFC based generation systems in distributed generation

During the past years, research and development actions in fuel cell technology have been stepped up within industry and universities. Therefore, fuel cells are now displacing towards commercial forwardness, or expecting a discovery within the next few years. Being an extensive technology, fuel cells are encountered with different designs and in several applications. The most important fields are small-scale power and heat generation, vehicle propulsion and portable purposes, such as substitutions for batteries. Having high efficiency, modular design and low noise these devices can represent an important role in next energy conversion. Nevertheless, problems such as cost are still the major barriers, although significant advances have been made in late years. SOFC based generation system use a stack consisting of 384 fuel cells connected in series, this provides 120-140 kW output power in stand-alone mode. The system has been analyzed when a step load is applied. Matlab-Simulink is used for the modeling and simulation of the fuel processor, fuel cell generator and power conditioning unit.