Hydrogen under the hood: Benefits for passenger vehicles

Special from GlobalData
Story by Frankie Youd

Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are here and we are becoming increasingly aware of their design, charging needs and environmental benefits. However, hydrogen is believed to be by many the next up and coming sustainable fuel alternative – especially for the very long-term.

Intelligent Energy, a UK-based hydrogen fuel cell manufacturer, have developed products based on their own hydrogen fuel cell technology, allowing the company to power from 800w to over 300kW. So far, this technology has been used in a range of applications including automotive and aerospace.

The company’s ‘Project Ester’ develops hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle technology, focused on an evaporatively cooled fuel system which has been designed for use in passenger vehicles as well as heavy-duty where conventional battery-electric based solutions fail to deliver. We spoke to Ashley Kells, programme director, Intelligent Energy, to learn more about the benefits of hydrogen as well as the company’s process for manufacturing hydrogen cells.

Just Auto (JA): Could you provide some background on the company? Ashley Kells (AK): Intelligent Energy was founded in 2001. It was formed by IPO and research that had been undertaken at Loughborough University. We’ve been focusing on several different products and commercialising those products. We do that across quite a wide range. Anything from low watt numbers up to a megawatt. Low watt numbers are anything from UAV drones, delivery inspection or forklift trucks for green construction sites.

We have our technology in the BMW factory in Leipzig. The automated guided vehicles are flat platform machines. They move pallets autonomously around the factory. They are now replacing the batteries with fuel cells.

Then we move into the bigger space, which is anything above 15 kilowatts; that's cars, trucks, buses. Then there's the expansion from that into stationary power; we can take the essential building block and essentially use under-used hydrogen.

Quite often there is hydrogen that otherwise is wasted. Sometimes it's from petrochemical use, which isn't great, sometimes from wind, or perhaps hydraulic hydroelectric. Rather than wasting the electricity, you can put it into hydrogen, generate electricity from that as and when you need it, because hydrogen is relatively easy to store compared to electricity in a battery, and then you can pump it back onto the grid.

What is project Ester?

A fuel cell is an electrochemical device that converts the energy carried in hydrogen into electricity with the by-product of heat and water. We've developed a metallic-based cell that's scalable, and that same cell is used in our heavy-duty truck, bus and in our passenger car applications.

Think of a loaf of bread. The number of slices dictates the voltage, and the size of it dictates the current. Using the exact same slice of bread cell, we can build up different size fuel cells for trucks and for a car. One of the reasons we've done that, of course, is try and get economies of scale.

We’ve developed two complete fuel cell engines; that ‘complete’ is a real key thing. It sounds like well, what else would you have done? Actually, a lot of people just do the stack. The stack on its own won't do anything.

What we do is we provide two complete engines, one in heavy-duty; it's a little bit more robust but it's still yields that same core sell ticket for economies of scale, and it still uses a lot of common components – although some key ones are just scaled a little differently.

We've got a couple installed in a bus in Taiwan and we're about to instal them into a UK truck. They're out there, we're selling them and they are a turnkey solution. You do put hydrogen in, and you get electricity, some heat, and a bit of water out.

We have the same for the passenger car space, it's a little bit smaller and it has been optimised to fit under the bonnet of a car. We've developed is around 157 kilowatts, peak.

What makes this technology unique?

It’s unique in terms of doing the whole thing. There are a few other companies that will provide a stack. Some supply it without a compressor, without the turbo equivalent. We did the whole lot. What that means is that our customers, whether they're massive OEMs or whether they're smaller companies, we can get moving quicker. It's all about time to get things moving.

Then over time it might be the people on the customer side take on more responsibility to impart their own DNA on the product. One thing that’s quite difficult to achieve is keeping that car DNA. A BMW feels different to an Audi. With the fuel cell, there is an opportunity to be able to tailor some of that as you go down the road.

The whole unit goes under the bonnet and has been designed to fit under the bonnet. There are obviously a few key things to bear in mind at the design stage – eg pedestrian safety dictating bonnet heights, having a lower bonnet makes a big difference and we've designed for that.

One of the key things that differentiates us from our competitors is the way we cool our fuel cell.

To some degree is a fuel cell is a by-product of electricity. It generates heat and that’s got to go somewhere. Typically, our competitors design a fuel cell stack which has got active plates, then a bit of a gap, and then another active plate, then a bit of a gap.

What they're doing is they're pumping glycol, antifreeze, around the stack. That requires a radiator that needs to go with it to cool things down. Okay, no different we need a radiator as well. However, what Intelligent Energy do is we inject water directly into the fuel cell. Every single cell is active, so we don't have any glycol cooling in the stack.

> What that means is when it comes to our cooling, we've got a more efficient way of cooling because it's a mix of air and water rather than glycol that we're cooling. It means that we can have a radiator that's approximately 30% smaller than a competitor would have.