Development of a Solid Oxide Fuel Cell System Towards Flexible Production of Electricity, Heat and Cooling Power for Transport Applications

Abstract

This work will show the coupling of a 6 kWel SOFC (Solid Oxide Fuel Cell) system developed by AVL using a stack module from Fraunhofer IKTS with a 5 kWcold absorption chiller developed by Graz University of Technology. The exhaust gas heat from the SOFC which is available at >200 °C will be used to operate the thermally driven absorption chiller. The SOFCs fuel flexibility was extended from gaseous fuels towards the utilization of liquid fuels such as conventional and synthetic diesel to address also transport applications. Besides a high electrical efficiency of 60 %, the option to generate cooling power in addition to heat is very attractive as it will enable new fields of applications in the transport sector such as conditioned freight transport and shipping containers or serving hotel loads of ships and trains which require simultaneous generation of electricity, heat and cooling capacity. An analysis of the system configuration and its dependency on various application scenarios is shown. Finally, the build-up of the prototype including test results will be shown in this work.