Coupling a metal hydride tank with a PEMFC for vehicular applications: A simulations framework

This paper presents a thermal coupling topology of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) with a metal hydride tank (MHT) based on FeTi metal hydride (MH) for vehicular applications. Usually, the heat produced by the PEMFC is evacuated to the ambient and MHT is heated by an external heat source, which negatively affects the efficiency of the PEMFC system as a whole. The idea is to reuse the heat generated by the PEMFC and re-inject it into the MHT to extract the usable hydrogen (H2) for PEMFC. Initially, a comprehensive model of a multiphysics system to manage the exchange of energy flux among the PEMFC and MHT is developed. Subsequently, two distinctive heat exchangers are integrated into the multiphysics system. The performance of the overall system depends on the effective regulation of both temperature and pressure associated with introduced exchanges. For that, two parallel controllers are devised to simultaneously regulate the H2 pressure and temperature of the PEMFC stack. The simulations of the system are established on MATLAB/Simulink software. It is shown by the simulation results that the proposed controller achieves the two requested objectives: maintaining the temperature and pressure of both the PEMFC stack and MHT for reliable operation.