Performance assessment of a power/refrigeration cogeneration system driven by the waste heat of a solid oxide fuel cell

A combination of a solid oxide fuel cell with two ccp subsystems to generate power and refrigeration is investigated in the present paper. the proposed system consists of two combined orc-vcr systems whose input energy is supplied by the waste heat of a sofc. energy and exergy analysis was carried out for the system components. the results indicate that by recovering the waste heat of the sofc, the energy and exergy efficiencies are improved by 45.82% and 6.14% compared to the stand-alone sofc system. in addition, the proposed system can generate 382.4kw power and 176.28kw refrigeration, respectively. moreover, the exergy analysis demonstrates that the air heat exchanger, afterburner, sofc stack, and evaporatori have a considerable exergy destruction rate compared to other system components. the effects of key parameters of the sofc and orc-vcr subsystems on the system performance are also analyzed. the results revealed that increasing current density increases sofc net power and refrigeration capacity. furthermore, by increasing the sofc operating temperature, the refrigeration capacity increases. however, an optimum value for the cell operating temperature produces the maximum sofc net power.