FCV Learning Demonstration: Project Midpoint Status and First-Generation Vehicle Results ^†

The “Controlled Hydrogen Fleet and Infrastructure Demonstration and Validation Project,” also known as the Fuel Cell Vehicle and Infrastructure Learning Demonstration, is a 5-year U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) project started in 2004. The purpose of this project is to conduct an integrated field validation that simultaneously examines the performance of fuel cell vehicles and the supporting hydrogen infrastructure. Four industry teams are currently operating more than 77 vehicles and 14 refueling stations, with plans to add over 50 additional vehicles and several additional refueling stations during the remainder of the project duration. This paper covers the progress accomplished by the demonstration and validation project since inception, including results from analysis of six months of new data.
With three sets of public results having been presented previously, this paper comes at roughly the midpoint of the project, just as second-generation fuel cell stacks and vehicles are being introduced and some early vehicles are being retired. With many fuel cell stacks having accumulated well over 500 hours of real-world operation, there is now a higher level of confidence in the trends and projections relating to the durability and voltage degradation of these first-generation fuel cell stacks.
Public results for this project are in the form of composite data products, which aggregate individual performance into a range that protects the intellectual property and the identity of each company, while still publishing overall status and progress. In addition to generating composite data products, NREL is performing additional analyses to provide detailed recommendations back to the R&D program. This includes analysis to identify sensitivities of fuel cell durability to factors such as vehicle duty cycle, number of on/off cycles, time at idle, and ambient temperature. An overview of this multivariate analysis and preliminary findings will be shared, with future project activities discussed.