Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Car Simulation
Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Car Simulation
An Overview of the Demonstration Program
HydroCar simulates a car with a fuel cell stack where hydrogen is the fuel. The car is equipped with a fuel cell, a pressurized hydrogen tank, an electric motor, an inverter and electrical batteries. The fuel cell will supply the power needed as long as the power needed does not exceed the maximum power output for the chosen fuel cell. The power exceeding this limit is supplied by the batteries unless the power needed exceeds the maximum power output of both the fuel cell stack and the electrical batteries. The batteries will be charged if the state of charge drops below a chosen limit and whenever there are excess energy from breaking (regenerative breaking is assumed).
The load of the car is based on the speed of the car. The car is assumed to run for about 40 minutes and then sit for about 20 minutes. The speed trace of the car is taken from the test procedures for HEVs (Hybrid Electric Vehicles) and consists of about 30 min. suburban driving and 10 min. driving on a highway.
HydroCar 1.0 uses TRNSYS which is a quasi-steady performance simulation tool. It calculates the state of each component every time step. TRNSYS is an ideal software for the modeling of systems composed of several interconnected components because TRNSYS itself is composed of linked modules.
The components used in the HydroCar are:
Most of the hydrogen models originated from Frauenhofer Institute in Freiburg. Their models have been further developed and improved at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in collaboration with the Solar Energy Laboratory. The present work to improve the models and make them available to other users is done at the Solar Energy Laboratory and sponsored by the Norwegian Research Institute.
HydroCar 1.0 provides a configurable user interface, running under TRNSED. The users can change several central variables. Pop up menus are provided. The system has an online plotter that plots some of the central variables. The online plots of the individual variables can be turned off and on by clicking on the labels for the desired variable thus making it easier to see the desired plots. The user can also stop the simulation (or wait till the end of the simulation) and zoom in on areas of particular interest. Additional plots can be made and printed/exported after the simulation is done.
After selecting "Calculate" from the TRNSYS main menu item, HydroCar presents an on-screen plot as the simulation progresses. The plot shows the some of the energy outputs from the system as well as the state of charge of the battery and hydrogen storage. The load that could not be covered by the system will also be displayed in the online plot.
The outputs are mainly of the energy outputs of the components. The outputs to the online plotter can be changed to other data such as the efficiencies, the voltage, the temperatures, the current etc. of the components. This is not included in the demonstration program due to the enormous amount of possible outputs. This could however easily be changed in the program.
When the simulation is done, the user can view the outputs, listing or make a plot of the selected outputs. The outputs is the summary of the energy outputs over the simulation period. The plots will be similar to the online plotter but will include some more outputs. The plots will be possible to save, print and configured to meet the users preferences.
Installing and Running the Program
The demonstration programs are compressed into one self extracting file. To uncompress the program and run the demonstrations, follow the steps listed below (the bold indicates the DOS prompt):
To run this demonstration you must have an IBM compatible computer (486 or higher), running windows 3.x or Windows 95, a VGA monitor or SVGA monitor and 10 megabytes of free disk space.
Comments or suggestions for improvements to the HydroCar demonstration program are appreciated. If you have any questions or wish to speak to someone about the Photovoltaic and/or Hydrogen simulations, please contact:
If you have any questions or wish to speak to someone about the TRNSYS program, please contact:
Download this file to get information about TRNSYS version 14.2 for Windows. The demonstration executable file is a binary self-extracting archive.
Click to download the Demonstration Executable File HYDRO.EXE.