Modeling and Simulation of Solid Oxide Fuel Cells from Waste Treatment Plant as Clean Energy

Due to the ever increasing global demand for energy generation specifically clean energy and electricity many engineers are concerned about sustainable alternative energy sources. With this objective in mind, this paper deals with a model which simulates a power and electricity generation plant by using biomass from an anaerobic bioreactor as a feeding “fuel” derived from organic wastes which is collected in a storage tank before sorting and screening. In this model the collected waste from the storage tank is fedto a semi-batch anaerobic bioreactor where the exit biogas from this unit passes through a catalytic reactor in order to increase the biogas composition before it is fed to a water shift reactor (WSR) where the carbon monoxide (CO) is removed by chemical reaction before feeding the two Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFC). The first cell which acts mainly as anelectrolizer is used to produce electricity and pure hydrogen (H۲) as the feed for the second SOFC. The simulation of this last SOFC is configured to generate more electricity from electrochemical reaction. Since deep seated design properties of SOFC enable us to apply standard continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) equations to the reaction kinetics of a SOFC. With this in mind, two CSTRs in series, acting one as anode and the other as cathode were used to obtain the reaction kinetics of the SOFCs’. A combination of Excel and Visual basic was used to simulate and obtain the needed crucial data for this model.