Impacts assessment and tradeoffs of fuel cell based auxiliary power units

Auxiliary power units are devices that can provide all or part of the non-propulsion power for vehicles (space conditioning/heating, refrigeration, lighting, etc.). In the first part of this series of two papers on this topic, an integrated framework to identify and quantify trade-offs between cost effectiveness, efficiency, and environmental and health impacts of fuel cell power systems has been introduced. The present work concludes the description of the framework analyzing the components not discussed in part I: environmental impact assessment, health impact assessment, life cycle assessment (LCA), and multi-objective optimization. At the end of the paper the results obtained from the simulation of a base case design are presented and discussed.