Applied Metal Hydride System Optimization to Improve Hydrogen Fuel Cell System Performance in Mobile Heavy-Duty Applications

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles face challenges in competing against battery electric systems as their efficiency is 25 % lower. Especially in the heavy-duty sector the efficiency of fuel cell electric vehicles needs to be increased accordingly, as this market will play a major role in future. One promising approach could be to decrease the energy demand of refrigerated trucks by the pressure energy between the hydrogen tank and fuel cell in metal hydrides to provide cooling power. However, the cooling power output is not constant and further efficiency improvements can be done. Here we show a simulative state space controller optimization which can provide a constant power output and can increase the efficiency by 8 % points compared to an uncontrolled system. A future combination with state-of-the-art efficiency improvement measures can potentially increase the system efficiency even further.