Cold start control of solid oxide fuel cell-internal combustion engine system

A solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC)–internal combustion engine (ICE) hybrid system is a recently-proposed distributed electric power generation system to achieve extremely high efficiency beyond that of current technologies. Unlike spark ignition (SI) engine, SOFC usually takes an hour to be warmed before working. In this work, an electrical heater is used to preheat SOFC and the power comes from ICE. Considering the hybrid system might frequently start and stop over several days, the economy of SOFC cold start is necessarily optimized. This paper establishes a simplified thermal model of SOFC-ICE system for SOFC cold start using MATLAB. The thermal dynamics is analyzed to improve the fuel economy with an equivalent fuel consumption minimum control strategy (ECMS) algorithm.