Study on efficiency improvement of fuel-cell-powered vehicle using water electrolysis by the electricity generated by recovering regeneration energy and avoiding partial load operation.
Details
Improvement in efficiency of fuel-cell-powered vehicle is studied using water electrolysis as the energy storage. Three method are proposed; 1. Reformer and fuel cell are divided into two or more units, and the maximum output of each unit is set small, which reduces the partial load operation, 2. all the fuel cell units are operated above the low efficiency partial load condition and the excess electricity is supplied to another fuel cell unit to generate hydrogen and oxygen by water electrolysis, 3. regenerated energy during deceleration period is used to make by hydrogen and oxygen. Moreover, the LA4 cycle was introduced the energy saving effects of the above-mentioned methods are studied for the fuel-cell-powered electric vehicle, and are shown to increase the energy efficiency by 1.23-1.72 times the conventional method.
