Wednesday morning of the Seminar opened with three simultaneous tracks; transportation, high temperature fuel cells and low temperature fuel cells. I chose to attend the transportation track. The session was well attended despite the fact that some of the original speakers had cancelled and been replaced with alternative presenters.
The presentations focussed heavily on the use of fuel cell systems in niche transportation applications and the primary topic of interest was fuel cell buses. The majority of speakers examined the performance of fuel cell buses in various demonstration programmes as well as operational experience with these vehicles and plans to deploy fleets across North America and Canada.
The highlight of all the bus presentations was Leslie Eudys speech on harmonisation and sharing of data from international fuel cell bus demonstrations. Eudy explained that in 2003 the U.S Federal Transit Administration began an effort to form a fuel cell bus working group. The goals of the scheme were to enhance the status of fuel cell bus programmes, collate data from across various demonstrations and coordinate better the results of such projects. Eudy highlighted several challenges faced when implementing shared data collection schemes and the efforts made to reduce these problems. The initiative has so far held four workshops, established three levels of common data collection across several bus programmes and continues to asses bus and infrastructure performance.
Moving away from buses, Bruce Rothwell of Fuel Cells Canada gave an excellent presentation on the Vancouver Fuel Cell Vehicle Programme. The programme involves five vehicles, all of which are Ford Focus cars. The objectives of the programme are to assess technology performance, increase public awareness of fuel cell vehicles, address infrastructure issues, demonstrate zero emission technologies and develop codes and standards. The vehicles have been operating since April 2005 and the programme will continue until March 2008 with a minimum target of 500 hours operation per vehicle per year of the scheme. Three fuelling stations are also operated as part of the scheme. Rothwell gave details of vehicle maintenance schedules, the wide range of partners and organisations involved in the project and early performance data.
Overall, feedback from demonstration programmes and initial results was positive, indicating that the various schemes were successful in achieving their initial goals. The morning concluded with a presentation from the Southern Fuel Cell Coalition focussing on its aims and objectives and specifically on its fuel cell forklift demonstration and the fuel cell shuttle bus data collection and conversion programme.
One of the main problems and conversely joys of an event the size of the Fuel Cell Seminar is juggling having meetings and catch-ups with colleagues from other companies, going through the, now huge, poster session, covering effectively the exhibition hall and (on top of all that) going to the presentation tracks. The Fuel Cell Seminar has something for everyone, but even with a team of four on hand some things just dont get attended.
Day 3 in the afternoon I went to the technical transport track, Gemma covered the exhibition hall and Mike the poster hall as well as Adrian on the stand.
The first presentation I was able to get to was by Honda on its new aromatic membrane. The claims made by Honda for this new bit were very impressive and include: high temp durability, high mechanical strength, high ion conductivity. One very telling graph showed shape deformation by the membrane, and a more traditional fluorine membrane, caused by temperature. The new membrane didnt show any noticeable shape change even above 150oC, implying a better cold start and longer operating temperature range. The rest of the presentation focused on the data from the FCX Concept that they plan to release in 2008 in Japan and the USA. Impressive statistics (2 kW/L and 1.5 kW/kg, both large improvement over the current stack technology) imply that the FCX Concept (or not, any more) will be exciting and cutting edge car to look forward to.
Keith Wipke, from NREL, is part of a project team working on a 5 year project to validate hydrogen vehicles and infrastructure in parallel, identifying the current status of the technology and its evolution. The use of this project is to see how far the technology is in working towards to the DoE targets for fuel cells and hydrogen vehicles. This appears to be a very interesting project collecting data from 4 project teams in Northern and Southern California, Florida, Mid Atlantic, SE Michigan. The data has now been collected for five quarters and some interesting results are already starting to appear. These include:
- 60% target efficiency of the vehicle current in vehicle fuel cell system efficiencies ranged between 52.5 to 58.1%, close to the medium term target,
- Fuel economy is also been seen to be good
- Vehicle range (300 mile target) vehicles fall short of that (around 200 miles)
- 0.7 kg / minutes refuelling time average at present goal 1 kg / minute
The graphs on these and other results that have so far been released (public update is every 6 months during the project run time) can be found at:
http://www.nrel.gov/hydrogen/proj_tech_validation.htm
I spent a few hours in the exhibition hall this afternoon chatting to the exhibitors and getting a feel for the atmosphere. Whilst the exhibition has been a little low on visitor numbers this year, the mood in the hall is generally positive and upbeat and people are viewing the exhibition as a good opportunity to catch up with old contacts and make new ones.
Interesting, there appears to be an increase in the number of component manufacturers in the hall this year, that is to say companies manufacturing parts for use in fuel cell systems rather than the actual system itself. There are many new faces and some companies we have not seen exhibiting before. Conversely, there is also a lack of some companies which one may expect to find at such a large fuel cell gathering. Of particular note is the absence of the large automotive manufactures although some of their suppliers are present.
The most eye catching feature (despite the Fuel Cell Today stand!) is the Go Ohio corridor. This area of the showroom is dedicated to hydrogen and fuel cell companies based in Ohio and which have received US$52 million of funding since 2002 for fuel cell research and development including materials. The US Department of Energy also has a significant presence at the show.