Nonlinear model reduction of a dynamic two-dimensional molten carbonate fuel cell model

A reduced nonlinear model of a planar molten carbonate fuel cell is presented. The model is derived from a spatially distributed dynamic model of the cell by applying the Karhunen Loeve Galerkin procedure. The reduced model is of considerably lower order than the original one and requires much less computation time. The comparison between the two models shows that the reduced model can describe the dynamic of the temperature field with sufficient accuracy and has good extrapolation qualities with respect to changes in the model parameters.