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Gas turbine technology has traditionally been used by the aviation industry for powering the aircraft including acting as APU. Operational unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has a gas turbine which is used as Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) which generically have overall efficiency not exceeding 35% which limits the range in terms of time in the air for the same APU fuel carried onboard. Gas turbine exhaust heat energy is largely wasted and there is scope of its utilization by thermally coupling it with a solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC). By coupling SOFC with the gas turbine (GT) based power system, a hybrid SOFC-GT based APU system has been proposed for thermodynamic analysis, and the thermal efficiency of the proposed system can be enhanced by 77%. This paper focuses on a thermodynamic cycle analysis of an internal reformed solid oxide fuel cell which is integrated with the gas turbine to form a hybrid APU system for an UAV.

In modern turboprop engines, reduction in emission and fuel consumption is the primary goals during the development of gas turbine aero engines. In this paper, a concept has been proposed for hybridizing the air blade cooled turboprop engines by integrating it with a fuel cell. The proposed study focuses on thermodynamic analysis of a turboprop engine integrated to a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) system. A solid oxide fuel cell is the perfect candidate for utilizing waste heat available at turboprop engine exhaust, through recuperation process. Integration of SOFC is ultimately leads to enhancement the overall performance of the turboprop-SOFC hybrid system. Power generated by the SOFC system can be utilized by the aircraft and in can complement the auxillary-power-unit (APU) and may even supplement it. On the basis of 1st and 2nd law of thermodynamic modeling analysis of a turboprop-SOFC system has been presented in this article.

An “APU” (Auxiliary Power Unit) is a small gas turbine engine to provide supplementary power to an aircraft and is located at the tails of larger jets. APU generators provide auxiliary electrical power for running aircraft systems on the ground. Applications include powering environmental systems for pre-cooling or preheating the cabin, and providing power for crew functions such as preflight, cabin cleanup, and galley (kitchen) operation and long-haul airliners must be started using pneumatic power of APU compressor. The Honeywell 131-9A gas turbine APU has 440 kW shaft power and 90 kW electric generator consuming 120 kg fuel/hour. Hybrid power systems based on fuel cells are promising technology for the forthcoming power generation market. A solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) is the perfect candidate for utilizing waste heat recovery. This case deals with waste heat recovery from fuel cell exhaust using Brayton cycle as bottoming cycle for additional power production.

This paper focuses on the thermodynamic analysis of Solid Oxide fuel cell (SOFC). In the present work the SOFC has been modeled to work with internal reforming of fuel which takes place at high temperature and direct energy conversion from chemical energy to electrical energy takes place. The fuel-cell effluent is high temperature steam which can be used for co-generation purposes. Syn-gas has been used here as fuel which is essentially produced by steam reforming of methane in the internal reformer of the SOFC. A thermodynamic model of SOFC has been developed for planar cell configuration to evaluate various losses in the energy conversion process within the fuel cell. Cycle parameters like fuel utilization ratio and air-recirculation ratio has been varied to evaluate the thermodynamic performance of the fuel-cell. Output performance parameters like terminal voltage, cell-efficiency and power output have been evaluated for various values of current densities.