Fuel Cell Vehicle Learning Demonstration: Spring 2007 Results

The 'Controlled Hydrogen Fleet and Infrastructure Demonstration and Validation Project,' also known as the 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 industryteams are currently operating more than 63 vehicles and 9 refueling stations, with plans to roughly double both during the remainder of the project duration. This paper provides a status update covering the progress accomplished by the demonstration and validation project over the previous six months. With two sets of public results having been presented in the spring and fall of 2006, updatesto these results, such as fuel cell durability, will be presented along with many new analysis results. These public results 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 being able to publicize the progress made by the hydrogen and fuel cell industry. At timeof publication the project will have collected over 2 years of vehicle and infrastructure data, and technical performance of vehicles and infrastructure will be compared against DOE targets through these composite data products. Examples of 2009 DOE validation targets include a 250-mile vehicle range, 2,000-hour durability of vehicle fuel cell stacks, and a hydrogen production cost of $3/ggeuntaxed, when produced in quantity. In addition to generating composite data products, NREL is performing additional analysis to provide detailed recommendations back to the R&D program. This includes multivariate analysis to identify sensitivities of fuel cell durability and other performance metrics to variables such as duty cycle, number of start/stop cycles, time at idle, and temperature.While many of these results will be protected detailed data products to be shared only with DOE and the industry partners, general trend results may be distilled into future composite data products. The methodologies used for this multivariate analysis and any preliminary findings will be shared, and future project activities and analyses will also be discussed.