Info on Ricardo jv18 Feb 2021 08:05
Not sure if links posted before but some interesting bits here -
These are not Ricardo’s only recent ventures into hydrogen-fuelling: in mid-January, it formed a strategic collaboration with alkaline fuel cell specialist AFC Energy specifically to create hydrogen fuel cell products and services, initially focusing on marine, rail and stationary power applications.
Although fuel cells may be the eventual winner over ICEs, scaling them up for high-power applications will not be straightforward. With current technology, an individual fuel cell can be up to 60% efficient, which is about 10% more than for an ICE but that optimum figure is reached at around 25-35% load and reduces when cells are stacked together for higher outputs, Mr Trevisan said.
However, Ricardo has developed an advanced control system that can boost the efficiency of such a stack, restoring its efficiency to 50-60% and Mr Trevisan is confident that fuel cell technology is improving rapidly and that its efficiency will improve in the future.
Its planned development and testing facility is expected to support further development for Ricardo’s hydrogen transport technology using what the company described in a statement as a ‘systems-led’ approach. This, Mr Murphy explained, differed from a conventional approach in which various parts of a system, for example, an engine, transmission and other components, would be developed separately and then brought together.
Fuel cell systems, however, have more complex interdependencies, he said, so if that approach were used for their development, “you would then find a whole new set of learning” when they were combined. Because of this, developing systems as a whole “means a faster route to market and cheaper development time, which gives a competitive advantage,” he added.
Ricardo’s new centre will combine highly-detailed models with components to enable this 'hardware-in-the-loop' approach. “Swapping [between] the real and the virtual is one of the challenges for modern test facilities,” he added, but Mr Trevisan said this approach has a significant benefit: it reduces development time by 30% and a systems-led approach “makes sure that the customer’s needs are really met.”
Hydrogen fuelling challenges
However, hydrogen faces a significant challenge, particularly for marine use: storage volume. Even when compressed to 700 bar, it takes up nine times the space of the equivalent diesel fuel, Mr Trevisan said. This comes down to a multiple of five if it is held in liquid form and to three times the volume if the hydrogen is provided in the form of liquid ammonia. Other benefits of ammonia are that it can be transported relatively easily and it is already a familiar commodity, he noted.
But now, Ricardo is exploring a storage option that might bring the ratio down even more, by holding hydrogen as a metal hydride, which would absorb and then release hydrogen from its surface, requiring neither high pressurisation nor liq
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