Based on the recent improvements in high-temperature fuel cells, distributed power generation fuel cell system of small scale (∼hundreds kilowatts) has been widely investigated. To improve the system efficiency, most developments focused on the fuel cell stack, but little was paid attention to the intrinsic exergy destructions at the other parts of a typical configuration. The main objective of this study is to investigate a feasibility of reducing the exergy destruction in the reforming process of fuel cell system, by using a homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) engine as a replacement of existing reforming subsystems, i.e. steam methane reforming (SMR), partial oxidation (POX), or autothermal reforming (ATR), in a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) system. To do this, parametric studies with exergy analysis were conducted by using in-house 1-D SOFC and 0-D HCCI simulation models. In results, due to the work production from HCCI reforming engine in addition to the work of the fuel stack, it is demonstrated that HCCI-SOFC system has higher system efficiency than partial oxidation (POX) and autothermal reforming (ATR) systems, which use similar partial oxidation reaction for reformer operation. Furthermore, because of no requirement for catalyst, the HCCI system demonstrates wider operating range than that of POX and ATR systems. When compared to the steam methane reforming (SMR)-SOFC system, the HCCI-SOFC system has the lower total work but slightly higher exergetic system efficiency, mainly caused by large amount of heat exergy needed to operate endothermic reforming process in the SMR process. Based on our simulation data, the exergetic efficiency of the HCCI-SOFC system shows 6.0%, 2.1% and 0.4% higher than POX, ATR and SMR systems at the highest efficiency points of each strategy, while 5.5%, 5.8% and 3.8% higher than POX, ATR and SMR systems at 99% methane conversion points in each reformer, respectively.

基于高温燃料电池的最新改进，已经广泛研究了小规模（几百千瓦）的分布式发电燃料电池系统。为了提高系统效率，大多数开发都集中在燃料电池堆上，但是很少有人注意典型配置其他部分的固有火用破坏。这项研究的主要目的是研究通过使用均质充量压缩点火（HCCI）发动机替代现有的重整子系统（即蒸汽甲烷重整（SMR））来减少燃料电池系统重整过程中的（火用）破坏的可行性。 ），部分氧化（POX）或自热重整（ATR）在固态氧化物燃料电池（SOFC）系统中进行。去做这个，通过使用内部1维SOFC和0维HCCI模拟模型进行了能值分析的参数研究。结果，除了燃料堆的工作外，由于HCCI重整发动机产生的工作量，证明HCCI-SOFC系统比使用部分氧化（POX）和自热重整（ATR）系统的系统效率更高。对于重整器操作，类似的部分氧化反应。此外，由于不需要催化剂，HCCI系统显示出比POX和ATR系统更宽的工作范围。与蒸汽甲烷重整（SMR）-SOFC系统相比，HCCI-SOFC系统的总功较低，但高能系统效率略高，这主要是由于SMR过程中吸热重整过程需要大量的热能所致。