Paper Title
Energy and Exergy Evaluation of an Integrated SOFC/GT/MED System based on Solar Methanol Reforming for Generating Electricity and Desalinated Water

Abstract
One of the most common methods, to resolve the energy crisis, is utilizing renewable and clean fuels. Continuously, the presentation of the multi-generation systems has been a great revolution in the energy field through the increment of the total efficiency of the energy systems. In this study, an integrated energy system,includingsolid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), gas turbine (GT), and multi-effect distillation (MED)unitswas simulated, by the Aspen plus software,in order to produce200 kW net electrical power and desalinated water. The hydrogen,used by the SOFC plant, was produced by the methanol reforming process, in a reformer, which heated up to 260 °C by solar energy. Parabolic dish collector was applied to absorb the solar irradiation. Buraydah city, in Al-Qassim region,Saudi Arabia was selected to study,and A dish collector was designed by MATLAB software, based on the maximum available solar direct irradiation, which was equal to 815 W/m^2.The energy and exergy efficiencies of the SOFC/GT integrated system were obtained as 44.5% and 62.4%, respectively.Integrating the an MED plant with the SOFC/GT increased the totalexergy efficiency of the system by 2%. Finally, the effect of fuel utilization and current density factorson the thermodynamic performance of the proposed system was investigated through sensitivity analysis. Also, an appropriate model was proposed to improvethe system performance. Keywords - Integrated energy system;methanol reforming;parabolic dish collector;solid oxide fuel cell; MED;exergy analysis.