Hydrogen is an well-healed element when it comes to fuelling propulsion. Its potential to replace liquid fuels in internal combustion engines is an heady prospect for many car makers, and the drivers for its implementation in that regime are vast. However, there is flipside significant opportunity for hydrogen in vehicle propulsion in the form of hydrogen fuel lamina electric power.
A team of Delft University of Technology technical department students studying to wilt tomorrow’s engineers have designed, built, and raced a hydrogen fuel lamina electric-powered Prototype to demonstrate the possibilities for hydrogen in motorsports, mobility and more.
The team, tabbed Forze Hydrogen Racing, was set up to slide the marketing, vivification and visibility of hydrogen and the technology inside fuel lamina cars. The result is a collaboration of wonk programmes and industrial partner-engineered design, providing a laboratory environment to develop hydrogen fuel lamina technology under rigorous racing conditions.
Forze Hydrogen Racing was founded in 2007 and started by putting small fuel cells on a go-kart. The latest car, the Forze IX, is a full-scale Prototype racer that currently competes in an Open GT racing matriculation in The Netherlands. It is considered a transilience in hydrogen fuel lamina electric car performance.
Fuel Lamina Operation
The Forze IX is an electric-powered Prototype racecar with a supercapacitor accumulator, and two self-sustaining EKPO fuel lamina systems that produce its electricity. The sensitive operation of the hydrogen fuel lamina makes designing one for the racecar using challenging.
The Forze IX represents an entirely new concept in racecar propulsion, a dual fuel lamina electric racer
The oxygen required comes from the outside air, which is scooped in from the main inlet on the roof and fed to the two cathode systems. Surpassing the air can reach the fuel cell, it must be conditioned to remove contaminants and rainwater. So it is run through filters designed with one of the team’s partners, Donaldson, surpassing stuff compressed by an electrical turbo-compressor from Fisher Spindle.
Due to this compression, the air heats up so, surpassing inward the cathode, it passes through an intercooler to tomfool it down. Compressing the air moreover enables energy recuperation from the frazzle flow, which significantly increases system efficiency.
Finally, Fumatech humidifiers moisten the air so as not to dry out the fuel cell.
The compressed, intercooled and humidified air then enters the cathode inside the fuel cell. Both cathode systems slosh as much as 16kg of air per minute.
At the anode, hydrogen molecules are split into atoms and stripped of their electrons, leaving a proton that needs to pass through the fuel lamina membrane. Meanwhile, the hydrogen’s electron is forced through an electrical circuit. This electron movement is current that the car can use as momentum power directly at the motors and power systems, or to tuition the accumulator.
At the cathode, the proton immuration with the oxygen in the air and re-combines with the electron to form a water molecule, which is then worn-out from the system using glut air.
‘What makes the car truly unique is that it runs on two separate and self-sustaining fuel lamina systems,’ explains Abel van Beest, team manager of Forze Hydrogen Racing. ‘Only a few experiments have been washed-up in the past with dual-engine cars, and this is a first for fuel cells.
‘Running on a dual fuel lamina system like this one has several advantages. Starting from redundancy can help in specimen of a partial system failure and reduce engineering risk as one system can be ripened and tested surpassing producing the second one.’
The Fuel Cells Provide A Continuous 240kw
The fuel lamina is a sophisticated onboard electricity generation device
‘The two EKPO fuel cells are very power dumbo and are therefore a unconfined match for a powerful, tightly packaged car,’ van Beest continues. ‘The two fuel cells simultaneously operate under self-sustaining deployment strategies to provide the most efficient performance for any part of a track, and indulge our engineers to develop and iterate upgrades much faster.’
Hydrogen Management
The total volume of hydrogen on workbench amounts to well-nigh 8.5kg, which is stored in four tanks at 700 times atmospheric pressure (bar). From the tanks, it is transported through high-pressure and vibration-resistant tubing from Parker to a pressure regulator that drops the pressure of the hydrogen.
The next stop is a hydrogen tenancy system, custom ripened by Forze’s fuel lamina engineers, in collaboration with Burkert.
This system unceasingly provides the fuel lamina with the word-for-word value of hydrogen for the demand. In some conditions, glut hydrogen is delivered to the fuel lamina to proceeds increasingly performance and lifetime. A recirculation system was ripened using a custom component tabbed the ejector so as not to waste the hydrogen that comes when out of the fuel cell. The ejector is a passive device used to sustain hydrogen recirculation to the fuel cell, specifically on the anode side, without power.
‘The ejector, in essence, can be viewed as a pump, a device that increases the pressure of a fluid to overcome the frictional losses associated with mass transport,’ explains India van Doornen, senior engineer at Forze Hydrogen Racing. ‘Within the tenancy of the various mass flows to and from the fuel cell, the ejector’s job is to maintain the hydrogen spritz on the anode side of the fuel cell, which a recirculation pump would typically fulfil.
‘However, a recirculation pump requires considerable amounts of power, usually in the order of several kilowatts, to unzip the required pressure lift,’ he continues. ‘This power would come from that produced by the fuel lamina system and is directly consumed by the systems supporting its operation, generating parasitic losses. The ejector, on the other hand, reduces the parasitic losses of the fuel lamina system by tapping into flipside energy source: the potential energy stored as pressure within the hydrogen storage tanks.’
The filtration, pinch and cooling system for the air side of the hydrogen fuel cell
The stored hydrogen must be returned to near atmospheric pressure surpassing the fuel lamina can use it, and the ejector system exploits this potential energy to increase the hydrogen pressure in the anode recirculation loop. The hydrogen feed is throttled to coincide with demand, and this process is not used to produce useful output.
‘The ejector increases the pressure of the gases in the fuel lamina anode recirculation loop by throttling the hydrogen to a pressure several bar whilom the final desired pressure,’ confirms van Doornen. ‘The hydrogen from the storage system is velocious through the ejector’s convergent nozzle geometry, which decreases the fluid’s static pressure.’
The ejector geometry ways the pressure of the fluid leaving the nozzle is lower than the pressure of the fluid in the recirculation loop. As a result, the hydrogen in the recirculation loop is entrained considering of the negative pressure gradient. The gases in the anode loop are therefore velocious and mixed with the hydrogen from the storage system at a upper velocity. At this point, a lot of the fluid’s energy is kinetic.
The spritz is fed through a diffuser to transfer this kinetic energy when into potential energy in the form of pressure, and the ejector’s geometry increases the pressure of the fluid relative to the entrained flow.
The Forze engineers optimised this component using spritz simulations, with help from FTXT. The car features an storage of supercapacitor cells from Musashi, enabling onboard electrical storage with ultra-fast tuition and venting to make the fuel lamina system efficient and practical for racing.
The hydrogen tanks shown as positioned in the chassis. Virtually 8.5kg of hydrogen are stored, at 700 times atmospheric pressure
Another partner, SciMo, provides the four lightweight and power-dense electric motors that indulge Forza IX to have a combined motor torque equivalent to that of a Lamborghini Huracán. The SciMo motor units moreover enable the Forze IX to regenerate as much energy in one braking zone as a Formula 1 car can generate in an unshortened lap.
‘Each motor is unfluctuating to its custom gearbox and drivetrain so the wheels can spin at variegated speeds, permitting for torque vectoring,’ explains van Doornen. ‘When the car approaches a corner, it needs to decelerate. A significant part of this deceleration is achieved by regenerative braking using the four electric motors to tuition the accumulator. When the car is most power sensitive, at corner exit, besides the fuel cells working on maximum power, the storage can be quickly discharged to the motors, delivering the total output of 600kW to the wheels.’
System Integration
Creating a lot of power unchangingly comes with a lot of heat, since no system is 100 per cent efficient. As such, the Forze IX is heavily cooled to maintain performance. Despite the significant new technical innovations onboard, the cooling presented some of the biggest diamond challenges for the project.
The hydrogen fuel lamina and supercapacitor storage run at very low temperatures compared to an internal combustion engine but, considering the temperature difference between the powertrain and the outside air is small, it is nonflexible to tomfool it using outside air.
The car is therefore fitted with five radiators spread over the car to write the cooling requirements, which the Forze team cooling engineers designed with partner, PWR. Pierburg pumps momentum coolant through the system at a spritz rate of up to 460l/min.
Cooling is critical, and the Forze IX features five radiators to thermally manage the dual fuel cell, supercapacitor electric powertrain
To have unbearable airflow through these radiators to mart the heat with the coolant, the Forze IX needed specialised aerodynamic bodywork to unbend its thermal requirements, while moreover maintaining unobjectionable performance and efficiency. The Forze IX piloting engineers designed the car’s stat fibre bodywork, which was produced with partner, Airborne.
‘The Forze IX’s shape is the result of over 500 iterations of airflow simulations to optimise the piloting for the application,’ highlights van Doornen. ‘The mass spritz of air through the radiators is 190kg/min, and the Forze IX still generates 1200kg of downforce at top speed. Plane with higher cooling requirements than other Prototype cars, the Forze IX has good aerodynamic efficiency with a lift-over-drag ratio of virtually 4:1.’
The front of the chassis is a stat fibre monocoque construction, built for suburbanite and systems protection, with integrated mountings at the rear to unbend power unit systems. The monocoque features a frontal extension to include the front drivetrain, while the when houses the storage and mounts for the inside subframe, all while weighing just under 100kg.
The car’s soul was iterated over 300 times using various CAE solvers to ensure seamless integration of the powertrain systems.
‘The inside subframe mounted overdue the monocoque houses most of the hair-trigger systems in the car, such as the fuel cells and the main tank,’ notes van Doornen. ‘It was optimised for stiffness and crash protection, while moreover willing the rear subframe mounting. The rear subframe consists of a structural motor and gearbox housing designed to nail to the rear suspension and a rear wing support structure to deal with those loads.’
The two fuel cells sit overdue the driver’s safety cell, mounted on the inside subframe
Forze Hydrogen Racing’s vehicle dynamics engineers designed the car’s double wishbone suspension.
‘The tricky part well-nigh designing the suspension was the little space we had to work with in the car,’ notes van Doornen. ‘We needed to ensure the forces were translated properly from the ground to the chassis and provide optimal road handling while tightly packaged.
‘Our suspension features high-quality situation from SKF that ensure a smooth and low friction movement.’
Using driving simulations, the Forze engineering team identified all the forces and shocks occurring within the suspension while racing. A damper package from Koni was then chosen as the optimal solution for the car, providing the suburbanite with the proper feedback from the interaction between the car and the road.
Control Systems
The Forza IX is a ramified machine, with a unconfined many systems interacting, so it needed a smart-ass to vivify and virtuously tenancy all those systems. A custom power distribution system was therefore designed to manage the energy spritz from the fuel cells to the four electric motors, two compressors and all other power devices.
‘The function of the smart-ass is taken up by our embedded system, which has a inside processing unit and distributed sensing and vivification units that operate like a nervous system,’ explains van Doornen. ‘All the embedded systems are prototypes, with many custom components and experimental samples from the automotive industry.’
The embedded inside tenancy systems monitor, protect and tenancy all the sub-systems in the car.
To help do this, the team ripened a component tabbed the supervisor node. This monitors the hydrogen tanks and refuelling system, checks high-voltage electronics and performs hair-trigger shutdown safely. It can take up all safety-critical features and operate them during a system failure or power loss.
Sensors and tenancy units throughout the car run the car
The state of the car is constantly monitored by over 400 sensors provided by team partner, Kistler. That’s increasingly sensors than on a current Formula 1 car.
‘The various sensors virtuously measure a large variety of parameters from which thousands of calculations of the state of hair-trigger systems are made to operate the car safely and in the most performant manner,’ notes van Doornen. ‘Measurement of many parameters are needed to learn well-nigh the systems since the team is working with all-new technology that has never been benchmarked before.’
The team’s electrical engineers have moreover designed custom telemetry system hardware that collects sensor data and communicates it to the inside tenancy unit of the car. From there, commands are communicated to the external hardware and relays telemetry, and to all other electrical components throughout the car when necessary.
The wiring harness and the inside tenancy unit, which has unbearable processing power to run all the tenancy systems and process all the data, were designed in cooperation with partner, Fokker, while the tenancy algorithms are written by Forze tenancy system engineers, and dictate at all times what the unoffensive components in the car have to do.
‘Due to its unique hydrogen electric design, the Forze IX consists of a unique hodgepodge of specialised electrical devices. To integrate those into a robust and embedded system, our software engineers had to diamond a completely custom and wide-stretching software structure,’ explains van Doornen. ‘It features low-level codes to interface specific devices, and high-level implementation for system level error handling.’
The supercapacitor storage is situated slantingly the driver, while the power electronics sit in front of the rear axle. The motors are slantingly each axle, delivering torque to the driveshafts via bespoke gearboxes
As it is not unbearable that the car itself knows what’s happening during a race, the trackside engineers moreover need to have all hair-trigger information to hand to spot mechanical or electrical problems whilst the car is on track, or run a power strategy at a particular moment in the race. Therefore, the Forza IX features telemetry using UHF, 4G and Wi-Fi systems. The car can transmit all the necessary data at various data rates depending on the loftiness from the pit wall. To make telemetry plane increasingly convenient, the Forze team, together with IBM, are setting up cloud-based telemetry for easy data storage and analysis.
‘The Forze IX is built to alimony growing and innovating, so that is what we are going to do,’ states van Beest. ‘In the future, Forze aims to shift towards endurance racing. We believe that is where the power of hydrogen lies.’
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