On-board renewable hydrogen production system for hydrogen hybrid vehicles

This paper investigates the plausibility of an onboard hydrogen production and storage system for a hydrogen hybrid vehicle. The proposed system is an interconnection of fuel cell, electrolyzer, batteries, ultracapacitors, active suspension and photovoltaic modules with electronic converters. Two different power sources have been considered for on-board hydrogen production and storage and have been investigated. These are; on-board hydrogen production employing electrolysis energized by electricity recovered from the vehicle suspension sub-system; and photovoltaic (PV) modules located on the external surfaces of the vehicle to obtain solar energy which may be converted to hydrogen if needed or otherwise can be used to drive a load or recharge the batteries; so reducing the demands on stored hydrogen, to allow increased range. A dynamic model of this on-board hydrogen production sub-system is implemented in MATLAB/Simulink and integrated with a fuel cell vehicle model. The entire system model is then parameterized to represent a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle for simulation analyses. The results indicate the improvement of fuel economy and driving range of the vehicle.