Design and development of a laboratory for the study of PEMFC system for marine applications

Abstract

Climate change is driving the introduction of strict emission limits in the shipping sector favoring the introduction of alternative fuels, among which hydrogen. While the storage energy density of this energy vector is a key challenge that makes way to a variety of different solutions, from fossil fuel reformers to sodium borohydride systems, fuel cell systems are generally considered among the future ideal energy converters. Nevertheless very few fuel cell marine applications are available worldwide, none of them is related to a ship application, mainly because of the high power requirements. Fuel cells are relatively new in the shipping sector, up to now no civil industrial system has been commercialized yet while military applications rely only on the U212 submarine of the Italian and German Navy. The lack of favorable niche markets coupled with the strong conservative and traditional design principles held back the investment for optimized marine systems. For this reason, present and past projects made use of conveniently adapted automotive technologies into pilot demos, with particular focus on Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC). However, ships requirements are largely different from automotive ones, not only for the power size that are in the range of MWs instead of kWs. On the other side, in order to take advantage of large scale production as well as of the modularity of fuel cell technology, the integrations of automotive or stationary based fuel cell subsystems, already available on the market, inside a dedicate modular marine system seems to be the solution pursued by many shipbuilders and contemplated by regulatory authorities. In hybrid system configurations, fuel cells are considered in combinations with batteries, another important technology under development, in order to take advantage of the superior energy performances of fuel cell systems and the highly power discharge dynamics of batteries. The need of fuel cell power systems for ships is pushing towards the creation of knowledge that requires laboratories able to challenge the abovementioned issues in order to give answers to shipbuilders and at a lower level also to rule makers.