Numerical investigation of combustion and flame characteristics for a model solid oxide fuel cell performance improvement

This paper applies computational fluid dynamics techniques to investigate the flame characteristics in the afterburner of a model solid oxide fuel cell system. The main objective of this research is to analyze the flame characteristics to serve as a reference for performance improvement of the model solid oxide fuel cell. The generated swirl burner was modelled under conventional and colorless distributed combustion conditions. It is because recommended for obtaining a more uniform temperature distributions over the entire of the combustor, resulting in far enough temperature levels for the best performance of the fuel cell. In order to achieve distributed regime during methane combustion, oxygen concentration in the oxidizer was reduced through entrainment of the diluent mixture (90% N2 and 10% CO2). The parameters affecting the performance of a model solid oxide fuel cell were also numerically investigated. The temperature zones obtained from combustion were used to initiate and sustain the solid oxide fuel cell. Cell performance values for different temperatures were analyzed and interpreted. The maximum power value was obtained under distributed regime. While the maximum power points of the cells were gathered in the high performance region at 15% O2, lower power values were obtained at 21% O2 content.

Automated summary

This paper applies computational fluid dynamics techniques to investigate the flame characteristics in the afterburner of a model solid oxide fuel cell system. The main objective of this research is to analyze the flame characteristics to serve as a reference for performance improvement of the model solid oxide fuel cell. The results indicate that the fuel cell performs the best under distributed combustion conditions.