Abstract:

More than 150 Hydrogen refueling stations were built around the world in the past 10 years. Fuel cell passenger cars are still far from mass production stage. The problem mainly lies with the high cost of fuel cell car production and insufficient hydrogen refueling infrastructure. While the future of fuel cell passenger cars are not clear, fuel cell for personal mobility devices like bicycles get more and more attractive. Hydrogen fuel cells as an alternative power source to batteries offers the advantage of ‘fast charging’, much longer range and long life time. This study discusses solutions for small sized hydrogen refueling stations based on pressure equalization and simulates the Hydrogen utilization ratio based on different equipment setup. This study relooked at different ways of hydrogen refueling and proposed a method to improve the overall cost effectiveness. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the refueling process and followed by a mathematical simulation. The Matlab based simulation program calculates how many hydrogen cylinders are needed to reach a specified distance. The work can be further conducted by studying the temperature effect of refueling and to simulate hydrogen utilization by varying source tank set pressure.