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# Studying a hybrid system based on solid oxide fuel cell combined with an air source heat pump and with a novel heat recovery

[+] Author and Article Information
Giulio Vialetto

Department of Management and Engineering, University of Padova - stradella San Nicola, 3 36100 Vicenza - Italy
giulio@giuliovialetto.it

Marco Noro

Department of Management and Engineering, University of Padova - stradella San Nicola, 3 36100 Vicenza - Italy
marco.noro@unipd.it

Masoud Rokni

Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen 2800, Denmark
mr@mek.dtu.dk

1Corresponding author.

ASME doi:10.1115/1.4041864 History: Received June 20, 2018; Revised October 22, 2018

## Abstract

In this paper, a new heat recovery for a micro-cogeneration system based on solid oxide fuel cell and air source heat pump is presented with the main goal of improving efficiency on energy conversion for a residential building. The novelty of the research work is that exhaust gases after the fuel cell are firstly used to heat water for heating/domestic water, and then mixed with the external air to feed the evaporator of the heat pump with the aim of increasing energy efficiency of the latter. This system configuration decreases the possibility of freezing of the evaporator as well, which is one of the drawbacks for air source heat pump in Nordic climates. A parametric analysis of the system is developed by performing simulations varying the external air temperature, air humidity and fuel cell nominal power. Coefficient of performance can increase more than 100 % when fuel cell electric power is close to its nominal (50 kW), and/or inlet air has a high relative humidity (close to 100 %). Instead, the effect of mixing the exhausted gases with air may be negative (up to -25 %) when fuel cell electric power is 20 kW and inlet air has 25 % relative humidity. Thermodynamic analysis is carried out to prove energy advantage of such a solution with respect to a traditional one, resulting to be between 39 % and 44 % in terms of primary energy. Results show that the performance of the air source heat pump increases considerably during cold season for climates with high relative humidity and for users with high electric power demand.

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