Thermo-Economic and Environmental Assessment of a Novel SOFC-Based Hybrid Energy Generation System for Combined Cooling Heating and Power Generation

Abstract The world's energy demand is increasing day by day due to industrial development and population growth. As a result, creating an effective energy-generation system is essential. In this work, a conventional hybrid solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC)-gas turbine (GT) system is equipped with an organic Rankine cycle (ORC) and a vapor absorption refrigeration system (VARS) for combined cooling, heating, and power production applications. The proposed hybrid trigeneration plant's performances were evaluated based on the energetic, exergetic, economic, and environmental points of view using computational techniques by engineering equation solver software. Additionally, working fluid selection was also performed along with parametric analysis of the proposed hybrid trigeneration plant. The outcomes reveal that the energy, exergy efficiency, network output, and cost rate of the proposed hybrid trigeneration plant (SOFC-GT-ORC-VARS) were enhanced by 39.83%, 9.21%, 7.85%, and 10.81%, respectively, as compared to the conventional SOFC-GT system; however, CO2 emission per MWh of energy output was reduced by 28.48%. Furthermore, cooling effect and heating effect from the proposed hybrid trigeneration system were observed as 53.14 kW and 123.20 kW, respectively. R1233zd(E) and R290 were observed as the thermodynamically and economically best-performing working fluids, respectively, among other tested fluids. Parametric analysis revealed that SOFC parameters highly affected the system's performance. Overall, it was concluded that the proposed hybrid plant performance is far better than the conventional SOFC-GT system.