Exergetic Assessment of a Newly Designed Solid Oxide Fuel Cell-Based System Combined with Propulsion Engine

Efficient, economic and environmentally friendly aircrafts and their operations have become the focus of research nowadays after the COVID-19 pandemic has spread around the world. This paper presents a combined solid oxide fuel cell with a turbofan engine system in order to improve the efficiency, cost and environmental performance. Two different analyses were conducted through analyses covering exergy and exergoeconomic aspects. Also, the paper investigates five alternative fuels with five fuel blends on the system performance. It is founded that the overall exergetic performance is the same among the five fuel blends of 82% exergetic efficiency and 18% exergy destruction ratio. In addition, using the methanol and hydrogen fuel blend appears to be the most economic way of achieving a relative cost difference of 38% and minimum price of electricity generation in the range of 108 to 621 $/GJ for turbines and SOFC. However, using dimethyl ether and hydrogen fuel blend becomes less favorable.