Environmental impact assessment of a newly developed solid oxide fuel cell-based system combined with propulsion engine using various fuel blends for cleaner operations

After the COVID-19 pandemic has spread throughout the world, many research institutions and industrial organizations are putting great efforts into producing environmentally friendly solutions for the transportation sector. This paper presents a newly developed combined solid oxide fuel cell system with a turbofan engine that can use five alternative fuels, such as dimethyl ether, methanol, hydrogen, methane, and ethanol, with different blending ratios to form five fuel blends. The proposed system is studied in this paper using exergoenvironmental analysis (which is known as environmental impact assessment by exergy) in order to quantify and evaluate the environmental impact. The combined turbofan has an exergetic efficiency of 82%, with total fuel and product exergy rates of 905 and 743 MW, respectively. The total environmental impact caused by emissions and exergy destructions has a range of 4000 to 9000 Pt/h for all the fuel blends. The specific exergoenvironmental impact values of electricity production vary from about 3 to 8 mPt/MJ for solid oxide fuel cells and 10 to 25 mPt/MJ for the three turbines. The exergoenvironmental impact of the thrust force is a minimum of 34 Pt/(h.kN) for the RF1 fuel and a maximum of 87 Pt/(h.kN) for the RF4 fuel.

Automated summary

This paper presents a newly developed combined solid oxide fuel cell system with a turbofan engine that can use five alternative fuels, such as dimethyl ether, methanol, hydrogen, methane, and ethanol. The proposed system is studied using exergoenvironmental analysis to quantify and evaluate the environmental impact. The results show that the system has a high exergetic efficiency of 82% and a wide range of environmental impacts for different fuel blends.