Data centers are notorious for demanding large amounts of energy from the electric grid and thereby contributing to a substantial carbon footprint. To attain sustainability goals, Microsoft envisions a ‘stark’ design for their data centers. They propose a power generation method that places fuel cells at the server rack level – inches from the servers. The close proximity allows for the direct use of DC power without the large capital cost, potential for failures, and efficiency penalties associated with AC-DC inversion equipment.
For many reasons, fuel cells are an ideal fit for data center power production. High-temperature fuel cells (e.g., solid oxide fuel cells, molten carbonate fuel cells), are typically more efficient than combustion technologies, are fuel flexible, produce virtually zero pollutant emissions and low greenhouse gas emissions, operate silently, and are commonly chosen for its combined-heat-and-power applications.
In this thesis, the steady-state and dynamic load performance of a 2.5 kW SOFC system was critically evaluated using spatially and temporally resolved fuel cell models. Spatially and temporally resolving each component of a single cell into individual nodes permits the localized dynamic analysis of the conservation of mass, energy, and momentum equations while also locally evaluating the temperature, species mole fractions, pressure, and other required characteristics. Then, the dynamic analysis for one cell is multiplied by the number of cells in the stack, ultimately representing the dynamic characteristics of the entire stack component. This discretization method is also applied to the balance of plant components of the SOFC system.