Exergy-energy, economic and environmental evaluations of a solid oxide fuel cell based trigeneration system

This work proposes a trigeneration system based on a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) for power generation, steam production, and cooling effects. The results show that energy, exergy efficiency, and total cost of the trigeneration plant were enhanced by 36.51%, 4.14%, and 1.76%, respectively, as compared to the conventional SOFC-based gas turbine plant. However, the CO2 emission per MWh of output energy was reduced by 26.73%. Additionally, cooling effects of 100 kW were obtained at 5°C for general-purpose applications, and heating effects of 101.4 kW were obtained by generating saturated steam through a heat recovery steam generator.