The debate surrounding vehicle emissions is never far from the headlines and given the recent focus on diesel engines, NOX is under the microscope just as much as CO2, with road transport increasingly being cited as having a significant negative impact on air quality, especially in areas of high population.
Hybrids and range-extended vehicles that feature an internal combustion engine are reducing the problem, but are unlikely to solve it on their own. The acceptance of electric vehicles – for years championed as the obvious zero emissions solution – has been held back by consumer concerns about price, convenience and range. Uptake varies geographically and remains inconsistent, not least because there is little consensus among vehicle manufacturers on whether battery EVs are the best answer.
With no clear agreement on which technology or combination of technologies is likely to prevail, development in the ‘alternative fuel’ arena continues apace – and companies at the cutting-edge of researched solutions are the ones best-placed to benefit. Intelligent Energy, an independent UK-headquartered energy technology group with more than 25 years of experience in fuel cell system R&D, is already working with a number of vehicle manufacturers on undisclosed programmes and believes it can accelerate the take-up of fuel cell technology still further by overcoming the limitations of existing EVs – and not only in the passenger car sector.
“A fuel cell EV is just an EV that refuels with hydrogen instead of recharging the battery pack,” says Dan Skelton, business development director of Intelligent Energy’s Motive division. “It overcomes the range anxiety and slow recharging rates associated with battery EVs while still delivering the benefits of a zero emission vehicle.”
Despite his enthusiasm for fuel cells, Skelton believes future vehicle powertrains will be drawn from a portfolio of alternatives, each optimised for particular applications. “For the foreseeable future, there will be a place for the battery; the choice for a fuel cell solution is whether to have a large battery with a small fuel cell or a smaller battery and a larger fuel cell,” he says. “In the first instance the fuel cell power unit is used simply as a range extender, while in the second case the fuel cell provides full motive power.”
Overcoming the obstacles
The usual objections to hydrogen fuel cell technology are based on cost or infrastructure concerns but Intelligent Energy is positioning itself to overcome these issues, with close to 1000 patents granted and more again pending, many of which are related to manufacturability. With three business divisions – Motive, Consumer Electronics and Distributed Power and Generation – the company’s philosophy is, says Skelton, “to develop once and deploy many times.” That means shared knowledge across divisions and technology transfer between apparently disparate market sectors, all linked back to hydrogen fuel cells.
Highly cost-focused products already developed by Intelligent Energy include the Upp micro fuel cell generator (which retails at around US$150) for recharging smart phones without an electrical supply and – in conjunction with Suzuki – a fuel cell Burgman scooter, the only type-approved vehicle of its kind in Europe. The Burgman uses an air cooled 4kW fuel cell stack, manufactured by a company that is a joint venture between the Japanese company and Intelligent Energy.
A recently announced contract to supply energy to more than 27,000 communication towers in India is valued at US$1.8bn over a decade and provides a platform to deploy fuel cell systems at large scale as a replacement for diesel generators and provides significant economies of scale in stack manufacture; much of the technology is equally appropriate for automotive applications and the numbers involved dwarf the current requirement for fuel cell vehicles.
In addition to commercial relationships with individual vehicle manufacturers, Intelligent Energy is participating in a number of consortium projects, including one to develop a new class of light commercial vehicle (LCV). Backed by the UK’s APC (Advanced Propulsion Centre), a government-industry partnership for low carbon powertrain development and production, the three year programme will work towards the development and commercialisation of fuel cell range extension technology in a battery electric van. The combined expertise of Intelligent Energy and its partners in the Zero Emissions Range Extender (ZERE) project – Millbrook, Frost EV, Frost Electronics and CENEX together with fleet operators British Gas and DHL – is capable of producing not just a vehicle, but also a mature supply chain and commercial framework.
“Some fleet operators are already active in the BEV market to comply with current and future legislation, achieving corporate environmental sustainability goals, as well as pushing for increased range and faster refuelling times to allow greater fleet flexibility and reduce costs,” says Skelton. “Many have indicated that without range extender technology, perhaps just 10% of total LCV fleets are likely to be switched to battery EV propulsion. Using cost-effective fuel cell technology, that estimate rises, in the short term, to over 30%.”
By targeting the LCV market, where fleet operation on a daily return-to-base principle is commonplace, Intelligent Energy is neatly side-stepping the need for widespread refuelling points. And while delivery fleets face the same emissions restrictions in city centres as other road users, they have been slow to adopt EV technology because of prolonged recharging times impairing productivity. Skelton’s view is that increasing the population of fuel cell EVs through fleet applications will accelerate the rollout of the hydrogen refuelling infrastructure.
The ZERE project
A technology demonstrator showcasing the ZERE technology has already been produced; in fact it is now in its second iteration, housing both the fuel cell stacks and hydrogen fuel tanks in a bespoke roof-mounted structure.
“The roof-mounted module suits both factory-fit and retro-fit applications and has no impact on cargo space,” explains Skelton. “It also makes it easier to adapt to different vehicles and, if required, removable at the point of resale protecting the residual value of the base vehicle.”
The demonstrator utilises a base electric vehicle – in this instance, a Nissan e-NV200 – which is factory fitted with an e-driveline to which a high efficiency, air cooled 4kW fuel cell stack is added, doubling the standard vehicle’s range to over 300km (180 miles). The hydrogen tanks can be refilled in under five minutes and the only gas emitted from the vehicle is water vapour.
The ZERE debuted in September at the LCV2015 low carbon vehicle event in the UK, six months after the project was announced. It was subsequently displayed at the Asia Clean Air Summit, which took place in Singapore at the end of October.
Manufacturing for the mass market
While a ‘back-to-base’ strategy of one refuelling point may work for light- and indeed heavier commercial vehicles, private motorists will need a network of hydrogen refuelling stations (HRS). This was confirmed recently in Europe with the announcement in September of the €68m (US$73m) H2ME hydrogen mobility project. Committed to the deployment of 200 FCEVs and 125 light commercial FC RE-EVs (Fuel Cell Range-Extended Electric Vehicles) and an additional 29 HRS across ten European countries, the initiative is being undertaken by a consortium in which Intelligent Energy is one of more than 20 partners.
To accelerate progress still further, a separate three-year programme charged with demonstrating that fuel cell stacks can be economically manufactured in high production volumes for vehicle applications by 2020 was launched in October. Again involving Intelligent Energy – in this instance as the lead partner – the VolumetriQ project will see a pan-European industry working group focusing on the development of a 90kW version of the company’s proprietary EC fuel cell architecture.
Part-funded by the Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking, a public-private partnership between the European Commission, European industry and research organisations, the initiative also involves Johnson Matthey Fuel Cells, Solvay Speciality Polymers, ElringKlinger and Pretexo, as well as BMW Group and Daimler participating to set out fuel cell stack requirements.
Heavy commercial vehicles
Looking beyond passenger cars and LCVs to larger road transport, the fuel cell stack used in the ZERE project is also suitable for auxiliary power generation or refrigeration on heavy commercial vehicles (HCVs). In this role, it would eliminate the prolonged idling of diesel engines when the vehicle is at rest, a particularly sensitive situation for the build-up of harmful emissions.
Several major vehicle manufacturers also predict that fuel cells could be an appropriate technology not just for auxiliary power, but for the motive power source in HCVs. Certainly a number of transit bus programmes are already well established.
Intelligent Energy has already developed 100kW fuel cell architecture and core technology which would be appropriate for the higher power levels required in such applications. The 100kW platform uses Intelligent Energy’s evaporatively cooled (EC) stack technology, which removes the need for individual cooling channels between each cell. Compared to conventional liquid-cooled fuel cell stacks, the EC design delivers a considerable advantage in terms of stack mass and volume, and the company claims that the resulting stack power density of 3.5kW/l (volumetric) and 3.0kW/kg (gravimetric), is best-in-class.
