Design and analysis of a fuel cell/gas turbine hybrid power system

This paper describes a fuel cell - gas turbine hybrid power system that aims to increase the system efficiency and decrease the costs by employing the waste heat from the fuel cell stack in the gas turbine. The hybrid system consists mainly of a proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell stack, a gas-turbine generator and a heat exchanger between them. In this paper, the plant layout of the hybrid system is described, and the dynamic model is presented. The hybrid system is to be optimized using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique, and the optimization procedure to minimize the total cost of the hybrid power system based on PSO is described. The implementation of the optimization method is discussed.