Optimal configuration and energy management for combined solar chimney, solid oxide electrolysis, and fuel cell: a case study in Iran

Solar chimney is one of the ideal green energy production systems which can be used especially in desert areas. Due to the high radiation of solar intensity in the Kerman area of Iran, it can be considered as a potential region for employing this kind of energy. One drawback of using the solar chimney is its low efficiency in the night time. In this study, a new optimal configuration is designed to generate both electricity and heat simultaneously. For continuously supplying the electricity, the considered combination gives good result while at night time, the backup energy can be supplied by generating the hydrogen with a solid oxide electrolysis cells and converting it to the electricity by solid oxide fuel cells. Afterward, a fluid search optimization algorithm is employed for generating an optimal economic system. The impact of the pressure of HRSG and the length of the cells are 3.21% and 21.17%, respectively. The effect of the other parameters is ignored. Experimental results showed that the efficient value for FSO and NSGA-II are achieved in 64 and 70 iterations and the optimal value belongs to FSO with 27,527,116,953 $ which shows using the designed configuration can better supply the demand properly in the summer than the winter and in the winter, there is more need to use the backup stored energy.