This study aims to model a fuel cell that is supposed to provide electric power to drive an airplane propeller. To model the fuel cell, a cloud-based software which is called Modelon Impact is employed. The Modelon Impact has several libraries that each library contains predefined templates and subsystems. The library that is used in this study is Fuel Cell Library in which the PEMFC template is chosen. This template provides a 1D model of fuel cell under steady state condition. After validating the model, the performance of the fuel cell is investigated.
On the other hand, the remaining electric power is generated by a gas turbine engine that is based on a project within MDU. Also, the MDU project provides a particular flight mission route in which all the required power is assigned for each segment of the mission. Accordingly, several case studies are assumed based on the required power that provide the basics to determine the number of cells that are required to achieve the requested power. Hence, a fuel cell stack is designed for each case study that can be integrated to the gas turbine to generate a combined power system. Also, this study investigates the impact of operating pressure on the performance of fuel cell. Finally, a performance analysis of the combined power system is provided.