Off-design Analysis of Organic Rankine Cycle Integrated with Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell

orc2019 Tracking Number 37

The primary target of this study is to examine performance shift during off-design operation of proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEM fuel cell). Recently, the organic Rankine cycle (ORC) system has been considered to improve the energy efficiency of the PEM fuel cell system through recovering waste heat from a fuel cell stack. However, due to deterioration of fuel cell or change of operating conditions, a heat source temperature of the ORC system can be varied which influence the performance of the ORC system. A key question of this research is, thus, how the performance of the ORC system changes from design point concerning a variation of temperature and mass flow rate of coolant of the fuel cell system. To investigate the off-design performance of the ORC system, mathematical models of the ORC system and PEM fuel cell are set up under a steady-state regime. The amount of heat played a more significant role in ORC performance when the evaporator size was enough to absorb waste heat of fuel cell stack fully. The performance of PEM fuel cell decreased with a rise of cell temperature from 343 K. But, the ORC system can compensate for the deterioration of PEM fuel cell.