Response Surfaces for Key Controlled Variables in a Hybrid Solid Oxide Fuel Cell/Gas Turbine System

Hybrid generation systems have been extensively modeled as a first step toward the development of automatic controls for the system. In most cases, it is impossible to validate mathematical models against real hardware because only a handful of hardware systems exist in the world. Data taken from the existing hardware has demonstrated significant nonlinearity, complex coupling between controlled variables, and sometimes non-intuitive behavior. This work exploits the capability of the HyPer hardware test bed at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) to generate data from a real recuperated gas turbine coupled with hardware simulations of a fuel cell cathode and appropriate ancillary equipment. Prior work has characterized the system only over a limited range of its operating envelope, due to the inability to manipulate multiple control inputs simultaneously. The work presented here fills the gaps using data from a 3⁴ factorial experiment to generate quasi-continuous response surfaces describing the operating state space of the HyPer system. Polynomial correlation functions have been fitted to the data with excellent agreement. Relationships between the control inputs and critical state variables such as cathode mass flow, cathode temperature, turbine inlet and exhaust temperatures and other key system parameters are presented.