As Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) technology is quickly developing and continuously evolving, high-fidelity mathematical models based on physical principles become essential tools for SOFC system design and analysis. Different modeling assumptions, however, are used by different groups, while in-depth analysis of influence of these assumptions on model performance can not be found in literature. Meanwhile, to support system optimization and control design activities, a trade-off often has to be made between high fidelity and low complexity. One factor that could define this trade-off is the number of temperature layers assumed to represent the SOFC structure. In this paper, we investigate different models for co-flow planar SOFCs that are derived using the finite volume approach with different assumptions of temperature layers in energy balance. The model with four temperature layers is used as the baseline model, and the other models aimed at reducing the complexity of the baseline model are developed and compared through simulations for different steady state and transient scenarios. Simulation results show that the model with as few as two temperature layers—solid structure and air flow—is able to capture the dynamics of SOFCs, while assuming only one temperature layer results in substantially different dynamic characteristics.
High-Lift System Optimization Based on the Kriging Model Using a High-Fidelity Flow Solver