The start-up transient behavior is an important issue in a turbo fuel cell system design. This paper developed a general dynamic model of the hybrid fuel cell/micro-gas turbine (MGT) system to investigate the transient behavior during cold start. The unsteady flow process through components of the turbo fuel cell system, which includes a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) stack, an afterburner, a turbo generator and heat exchangers, was modeled using a filling-and-emptying approach. Each major component was treated as a function block in the coded model. Computer simulations were performed on a Matlab/Simulink platform based on the block-diagram concept. The main focus of this study is on the start-up transient behavior of a basic turbo fuel cell system. The simulation results show that the start-up time for the example turbo fuel cell system (200 kW SOFC plus 50 kW MGT) can be up to about a few hours. Preliminary parametric investigations with different operating conditions show that the start-up duration can be reduced to less than I h. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.