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Most fuel cell vehicle (FCV) developers believe that a liquid fuel
is needed to make fuel cell cars viable beyond a niche market opportunity.
Reforming hydrocarbon fuels to a hydrogen rich gas is a well established
industrial process - the challenge for powertrain developers is
to engineer inexpensive, very compact reformers capable of quick
start-up and fast dynamic response.
Current development work within the industry
is focused on methanol, from which it is relatively easy to extract
hydrogen. Gasoline reforming is more complex, requiring much higher
temperatures than methanol reforming. Furthermore a gasoline reformer
yields a lower concentration of hydrogen than methanol, thus limiting
fuel cell stack efficiency.
Orbital has applied its specialist powertrain
and combustion engineering skills at two distinct developmental
challenges. Our computer aided design and numerical simulation techniques
have been utilised by clients to study the distribution and flow
through various FC stack designs, whilst in another application
Orbital’s air assist direct injection hardware has been used
to study optimisations to the performance of a gasoline reformer.
Your project too can take advantage of these advanced development
capabilities.
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