Designing, building, testing and racing a low-cost fuel cell range extender for a motorsport application

Imperial Racing Green is an undergraduate teaching project at Imperial College London. Undergraduate engineers have designed, built and raced hydrogen fuel cell hybrid vehicles in the Formula Zero and Formula Student race series. Imperial Racing Green has collaborated with its fuel cell partners to develop a 13 kW automotive polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) system. A team of undergraduate engineers were given a relatively modest budget and less than 8 months to design and assemble an operational high-power PEMFC system. The fuel cell system was designed to provide the average power required by the team's 2011 Formula Student entry. This paper presents the team's experience of developing and testing an automotive fuel cell system for a race application and plans for its future development and integration onto the vehicle.