Constraint (10) assures balancing of components volume after disassembling the products between plant and collection center.
Only modest reductions in the system mass can be expected with improvements in the balance-of-plant components.
Because of unavoidable losses in the balance-of-plant components, the system-level efficiency is significantly lower than the efficiency of the SOFC itself.
The functioning of a complete fuel cell system depends upon the contributions of supporting balance-of-plant components (e.g., fuel-processing reactors and heat exchangers).
A complete fuel processing subsystem, with all necessary BOP (balance-of-plant) components, is modeled and coupled to the fuel cell stack subsystem.
This chapter begins by introducing solid-oxide fuel-cell systems, including a description of balance-of-plant components and alternative cell architectures.
High investment costs and not yet optimized balance-of-plant components lead to the system's poor economic performance at the current state of technology.
A complete fuel processing subsystem, with all necessary balance-of-plant components, is modeled and coupled to the fuel cell stack subsystem.
Furthermore, besides the basic cell-stack, the so-called balance-of-plant components, i.e., power supply/voltage regulator, water supply and circulation, gas separators, heat exchanger, controls and instrumentation, add significant costs to these systems.
System modeling at the level which encompasses not only the storage material and vessel/reactor, but also integration with a fuel cell and balance-of-plant components, provides a more complete assessment of viability and guides options for improvement.
