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.