High temperature battery systems for a fuel cell hybrid vehicle

With the requirements for reducing emissions and improving fuel economy, new markets have become attractive for automotive companies that are developing electric, hybrid, and plug-in vehicles using new technologies candidates to be implemented in the next generations of vehicles. Hybrid vehicles (HVs) offer improved fuel economy and take the advantage of existing fuel infrastructure but still depend entirely on petroleum to charge the battery pack. On the other hand, vehicles totally based on fuel cell (FC) have been proposed, but still face significant improvement above all for high cost that limit market penetration. A small FC used as on board batteries charge in a range extender approach allows reducing costs, weight and recharging time of batteries and, at the same time, to increase the range with respect to the equivalent electric vehicle. The vehicle selected for the prototype realization is an electric bus having a capacity of 44 passengers driven by an AC Induction Motor of 85 kW and supplied from an IGBT Mono Inverter via a Zebra battery bank (Na-NiCl2 technology). In the proposed configuration, a FC system of 5 kW works as batteries recharge and provides, following an identified strategy, the necessary power to the driving cycle to increase the autonomy of the vehicle. An advanced network of infrastructures, based on the use of RES, hydrogen and electricity storage (Na-NiCl2 technology has been selected also in this case) needed to support the bus have been provided. In order to make the balance between the electricity produced from renewable energy and the energy needed to the electrolyzer, the compressor and electric charging stations, equal to zero and to achieve a zero environmental impact, an energy management system integrated in the ICT platform has been envisaged.