Hydrogen fuel cell hybrid scooter (HFCHS) with plug-in features on Birmingham campus

A commercially available ‘pure’ lead-acid battery electric scooter (GoPed) was converted to a hydrogen fuel cell battery hybrid scooter (HFCHS) in views of investigating the effect of hybridisation on driving duty cycles, range, performance, recharging times, well-to-wheel CO2 footprint and overall running costs. The HFCHS with plug-in features consisted mainly of a 500 W hydrogen PEM Fuel Cell stack connected to four 12 V 9 Ah lead-acid batteries and two hydrogen metal-hydride canisters supplying pure hydrogen (99.999%) and also acting as heat sink (due to endothermic hydrogen desorption process). In this study, the HFCHS urban driving cycle was compared with that of a conventional petrol and ‘pure’ battery electric scooter. The energy consumed by the HFCHS was 0.11 kWh/km, with an associated running cost of £0.01/km, a well-to-wheel CO2 of 9.37 g CO2/km and a maximum range of 15 miles. It was shown that the HFCHS gave better energy efficiencies and speeds compared to battery and petrol powered GoPed scooters alone.