A novel type of PEMFC-based CCHP system with independent control of refrigeration and dehumidification

• A PEMFC-based CCHP system with dehumidification is proposed. • The effects of operating parameters on the system performance are studied. • Refrigeration and dehumidification are controlled through the hot water proportion. • The system meets the needs of electricity, heating, cooling and dehumidification. The traditional combined cooling, heating and power (CCHP) system can only provide cooling power, heating power and electricity. However, when the CCHP system is used in places with high humidity requirements such as data centers, it cannot meet the humidity control requirements. Based on this, this study proposes a CCHP system with independent control of refrigeration and dehumidification based on a PEMFC. The system model is developed by MATLAB/Simulink, and its performance and efficiency are comparatively analyzed. The results show that the current density and hot water distribution ratio are critical to the performance of the system. Meanwhile, the mass flow rate of the cooling water and chilled water of the adsorption chiller and the parameters of the process air also have an impact on the performance of the system. When the mass flow rates of cooling water and chilled water increase from 0.2 kg·s −1 to 0.8 kg·s −1 , the cooling power of the system increases from 5.3 kW and 5.12 kW to 6.52 kW and 6.64 kW, respectively. Moreover, the addition of the dehumidification system reduces the cooling power by 1.28 kW but removes the latent heat of the process air by about 1.84 kW.