Abstract The sharp rise in energy demand in next-generation aircraft motivates this study, which proposes a novel kerosene-ammonia dual-fuel hybrid system. By integrating an ammonia-air heat exchanger and a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) into a turbofan, ammonia serves as both coolant and fuel. System performance was compared across three configurations, including a baseline single fuel system (Scheme 0), an ammonia-cooled system without SOFC (Scheme 1), and a full hybrid system (Scheme 2), with a focus on specific thrust, thermal efficiency, and fuel consumption. The hybrid system achieved a specific thrust of 929.91 N/(kg/s) and thermal efficiency of 45.1%, surpassing the baseline scheme by 3.52% and 4.64%, respectively. The enhancements are attributed to a decrease in turbine cooling air requirements, resulting from ammonia's higher heat sink capacity, and the implementation of direct electrochemical conversion in the SOFC, which overcomes the Carnot cycle limits. Enthalpy entropy analysis confirmed a 3.38% reduction in entropy generation in Scheme 2, indicating higher energy utilization quality. Key influencing parameters, including ammonia mass fraction (δf) and SOFC flow allocation ratio (δsofc), were rigorously analyzed. An increase in δf resulted in greater thrust, which entailed a corresponding trade-off with cooling capacity to achieve its maximum, and higher δsofc improved thermal efficiency. Optimal performance was attained at δf and δsofc of 0.237 and 0.644, respectively, under a cooling temperature drop of 250 K, demonstrating substantial improvement in thrust output and energy utilization efficiency.
Tian et al. (Thu,) studied this question.