Design and implementation of on-board hydrogen production and storage system for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles

As clean and efficient electrical power sources, hydrogen fuel cells have a range of vehicular applications and have been considered as promising elements for renewable electrical power utilization in automotive applications. This paper presents a novel systemized integration of an electrolyser and fuel cell to recover energy otherwise dissipated in the vehicle´s suspension, producing hydrogen to augment onboard stores, increasing efficiency and vehicle range. In this work an investigation of the feasibility of a generic on-board hydrogen production and storage system for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is carried out. A dynamic model of an on-board hydrogen production employing electrolysis energized by electricity recovered from the vehicles suspension sub-system, is implemented in MATLAB/Simulink™ and integrated with a fuel cell vehicle model. The entire system model then parameterized to represent vehicle simulator. An analysis of the effect of integrating such on-board hydrogen production is conducted. The simulation results show that by using recovered energy normally lost in damping, appreciable benefits might be accrued from hydrogen production on-board.