FCV Learning Demonstration: Project Midpoint Status and First-Generation Vehicle Results (Presentation)
The “Controlled Hydrogen Fleet and Infrastructure Demonstration and Validation Project,” also known as the Fuel Cell Vehicle and Infrastructure Learning Demonstration, is a 5-year U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) project started in 2004. The purpose of this project is to conduct an integrated field validation that simultaneously examines the performance of fuel cell vehicles and the supporting hydrogen infrastructure. Four industry teams are currently operating more than 77 vehicles and 14 refueling stations, with plans to add over 50 additional vehicles and several additional refueling stations during the remainder of the project duration. This paper covers the progress accomplished by the demonstration and validation project since inception, including results from analysis of six months of new data. With three sets of public results having been presented previously, this paper comes at roughly the mid-point of the project, just as second-generation fuel cell stacks and vehicles are being introduced and some early vehicles are being retired. With many fuel cell stacks having accumulated well over 500 hours of real-world operation, there is now a higher level of confidence in the trends and projections relating to the durability and voltage degradation of these first-generation fuel cell stacks.Public results for this project are in the form of composite data products, which aggregate individual performance into a range that protects the intellectual property and the identity of each company, while still publishing overall status and progress. In addition to generating composite data products, NREL is performing additional analyses to provide detailed recommendations back to the R&D program. This includes analysis to identify sensitivities of fuel cell durability to factors such as vehicle duty cycle, number of on/off cycles, time at idle, and ambient temperature. An overview of this multivariate analysis and preliminary findings will be shared, with future project activities discussed.
Hydrogen quality for fuel cell vehicles - a modeling study of the sensitivity of impurity content in hydrogen to the process variables in the SMR-PSA pathway.
Abstract As fuel cell vehicles approach wide-scale deployment, the issue of the quality of hydrogen dispensed to the vehicles has become increasingly important. The various factors that must be considered include the effects of different contaminants on fuel cell performance and durability, the production and purification of hydrogen to meet fuel quality guidelines, and the associated costs of providing hydrogen of that quality to the fuel cell vehicles. In this paper, we describe the development of a model to track the formation and removal of several contaminants over the various steps of hydrogen production by steam-methane reforming (SMR) of natural gas, followed by purification by pressure-swing adsorption (PSA). We have used the model to evaluate the effects of setting varying levels of these contaminants in the product hydrogen on the production/purification efficiency, hydrogen recovery, and the cost of the hydrogen. The model can be used to track contaminants such as CO 2 , CO, N 2 , CH 4 , and H 2 S in the process. The results indicate that a suggested specification of 0.2 ppm CO would limit the maximum hydrogen recovery from the PSA under typical design and operating conditions. The steam-to-carbon ratio and the process pressure are found to have a significant impact on the process efficiency. Varying the CO specification from 0.1 to 1 ppm is not expected to affect the cost of hydrogen significantly, although the cost of gas analysis to comply with such stringent requirements may add 2–10 cents/kg to the cost of hydrogen.
Controlled Hydrogen Fleet and Infrastructure Analysis
This project overview was presented at the 2012 DOE Annual Merit Review and Peer Evaluation Meeting in Washington, DC. It provides project objectives, relevance and targets for the Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle (FCEV) Learning Demo, a 7-year project and the largest single FCEV and infrastructure demonstration in the world to date. The presentation includes: timelines, major milestones, infrastructure status, accomplishments, highlights of collaborations, and future work.