Thermal Management in Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles
A wide range of automobiles have the potential to use fuel cells for propulsion and auxiliary power applications. The current work aims to tackle the issue of 'oversized' radiators in fuel cell electric vehicles.
A wide range of automobiles, from light-duty cars to heavy-duty buses have the potential to use fuel cells for propulsion and auxiliary power applications. While benefits such as reliability, low pollution and high efficiency of fuel cells are advantageous, several inadequacies need to be addressed before these electrochemical devices can be relied on for transportation applications. The current work focuses on the thermal management aspect of fuel cell based electric vehicles (FCEV). Although FCEVs use radiators similar to that of a conventional internal combustion engine radiator, the size of radiators in FCEVs need to be much larger. This is because the operating temperature of a fuel cell is lower than an internal combustion engine which makes the difference between ambient temperature and coolant temperature also low. Hence the area of radiators needs to be larger to permit the required heat dissipation. Large radiators overload the vehicle and increase fuel consumption. The proposed research explores the possibility to compact the existing oversized radiators in FCEVs by adding a latent heat energy storage system along with it.
Result of the sizing analysis using Pinch methodology is shown:
The optimization studies show the possibility to bring down the minimum radiator area requirement in a fuel cell vehicle like the 2022 Toyota Mirai by 5.5 times by using around 13 kg of Paraffin Wax PCM along with it.