Fast RTO Applied to a Commercial SOFC System

TAFAREL DE AVILA FERREIRA; D. BONVIN; Z. WUILLEMIN; ALEJANDRO G. MARCHETTI

Florianópolis

Simposio; 12th IFAC Symposium on Dynamics and Control of Process Systems, including Biosystems (DYCOPS 2019); 2019

IFAC

The experimental implementation of real-time optimization (RTO) to a commercial solid-oxide fuel-cell (SOFC) system is reported in this paper. The goal of RTO is to maximizethe system eciency at steady state subject to several operating constraints. The proposed RTO strategy is a constraint-adaptation approach, which consists in adding bias correction terms to the constraints in the optimization problem. These bias terms are estimated during operation using transient measurements in combination with a dynamic model. The scheme enforces plant optimality by continuously detecting and tracking the set of active constraints. This approach drives the fuel-cell system quickly to the desired power demand, while maximizing the eciency and paying attention to constraint satisfaction. As such, this RTO scheme has the ability to both control and optimize fuel-cell systems. This experimental system reached about 65% eciency. In addition, it was possible to deal with slow drifts such as degradation without compromising on optimality.