Studying a Hybrid System Based on Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Combined With an Air Source Heat Pump and With a Novel Heat Recovery

In this paper, a new heat recovery for a microcogeneration system based on solid oxide fuel cell and air source heat pump (HP) 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 first used to heat water for heating/domestic water and then mixed with the external air to feed the evaporator of the HP 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 HP 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 (COP) 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 (RH) (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% RH.

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. The results show that the performance of the air source HP increases considerably during cold season for climates with high RH and for users with high electric power demand.