Fuel cells due to different useful features such as high efficiency, low pollution, noiselessness, lack of moving parts, variety of fuels used and wide range of capacity of these sources can be the main reasons for their tendency to use them in different applications. In this study, the application of a high temperature proton exchange membrane fuel cell (HT-PEMFC) in a combined heat and power (CHP) plant has been analyzed. This study presents a multi-objective optimization method to provide an optimal design parameters for the HT-PEMFC based micro-CHP during a 14,000 h lifetime by considering the effect of degradation. The purpose is to optimize the net electrical efficiency and the electrical power generation. For the optimization process, different design parameters including auxiliary to process fuel ratio, anodic stoichiometric ratio, steam to carbon ratio, and fuel partialization level have been employed. For optimization, A new technique based on Tent mapping and Lévy flight mechanism, called improved collective animal behavior (ICAB) algorithm has been employed to solve the algorithm premature convergence shortcoming. Experimental results of the proposed method has been applied to the data of a practical plant (Sidera30) for analyzing the efficiency of the proposed ICAB based system, it is compared with normal condition and another genetic algorithm based method for this purpose. Final results showed that the difference between the maximum electrical power production under normal condition and ICAB based condition changes from 2.5 kW when it starts and reaches to its maximum value, 3.0 kW, after 14,000 h lifetime. It is also concluded that the cumulative average for the normal and the ICAB based algorithm are 24.01 kW and 27.04 kW, respectively which showed about 3.03 kW cumulative differences.

燃料电池由于具有不同的有用特性，例如效率高，污染低，无噪音，缺少活动部件，所使用的燃料种类繁多以及这些来源的容量范围广泛，可能是它们倾向于在不同应用中使用的主要原因。在这项研究中，分析了高温质子交换膜燃料电池（HT-PEMFC）在热电联产（CHP）装置中的应用。这项研究提出了一种多目标优化方法，通过考虑降解的影响，为基于HT-PEMFC的微型CHP在14,000小时的使用寿命中提供了最佳的设计参数。目的是优化净电效率和发电量。对于优化过程，不同的设计参数包括辅助燃料对过程的燃料比，阳极化学计量比，蒸汽与碳的比率以及燃料的偏分化水平已被采用。为了优化，采用了一种基于帐篷映射和Lévy飞行机制的新技术，称为改进的集体动物行为（ICAB）算法，以解决该算法过早收敛的缺点。将该方法的实验结果应用于实际工厂（Sidera30）的数据，以分析该基于ICAB的系统的效率，并与正常条件和基于此目的的另一种遗传算法的方法进行了比较。最终结果表明，正常条件下的最大发电量与基于ICAB的条件下的发电量之间的差异从启动时的2.5 kW变化到寿命14,000小时后达到最大值3.0 kW。