First Hydrogen Fuel Sampling from a Fuel Cell Hydrogen Electrical Vehicle–Validation of Hydrogen Fuel Sampling System to Investigate FCEV Performance

Abstract

Fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEV) are developing quickly from passenger vehicles to trucks or fork-lifts. Policymakers are supporting an ambitious strategy to deploy fuel cell electrical vehicles with infrastructure as hydrogen refueling stations (HRS) as the European Green deal for Europe. The hydrogen fuel quality according to international standard as ISO 14687 is critical to ensure the FCEV performance and that poor hydrogen quality may not cause FCEV loss of performance. However, the sampling system is only available for nozzle sampling at HRS. If a FCEV may show a lack of performance, there is currently no methodology to sample hydrogen fuel from a FCEV itself. It would support the investigation to determine if hydrogen fuel may have caused any performance loss. This article presents the first FCEV sampling system and its comparison with the hydrogen fuel sampling from the HRS nozzle (as requested by international standard ISO 14687). The results showed good agreement with the hydrogen fuel sample. The results demonstrate that the prototype developed provides representative samples from the FCEV and can be an alternative to determine hydrogen fuel quality. The prototype will require improvements and a larger sampling campaign.

Assessing the Performance of Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles Using Synthetic Hydrogen Fuel

“…The gas sampling system was designed following the approach of Bacquart et al [14] except with several adaptations (schematic presented in Supplementary Materials). The pressure regulator was replaced by a Sulfinert pressure relief valve set at 100 bar.…”

“…The two samplings were obtained from the same gas sampling line. The sampling protocol applied in this study was described by Bacquart et al [14].…”

“…Figure S1. NPL sampling rig modified from Bacquart et al [14] including sulfinert passivated flow path from C1 to the cylinder. Table S2.…”

“…The discussion will highlight the determination of the reference amount fraction of each compound in the different composition experiments based on the different measurement methods available (temperature, pressure, mass). The study will present the verification of the actual mixture composition through samplings using the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) sampling tool [14] and gas analysis to assess its representativeness. Then, a discussion on the actual agreement between the theoretical value and the measured value is presented, with a focus on the sampling rig performance.…”