Synergies of fuel cell system thermal management and cryogenic hydrogen exergy utilization

Low-temperature polymer electrolyte fuel cell systems (FCSs) need to reject large amounts of low temperature heat. Often a mobile FCS’s cooling capacity limits the FCS power output. Cryogenic hydrogen is typically utilized as a direct heat sink using heat exchangers (HXs), even though HXs destroy most hydrogen exergy. This paper investigates synergies between FCS thermal management and cryogenic hydrogen exergy utilization in terms of their benchmark performance: the FCS coolant circuit supplies heat at coolant temperature level to a so named reversible cryogenic exergy utilization system (rCEUS) comprised of thermodynamically ideal heat engine processes. The rCEUS converts this heat partly to electrical energy (the value of which equals the hydrogen exergy) and rejects remaining heat to hydrogen to heat it to coolant temperature. The rCEUS output power is used to support the FCS, so the FCS rejects less heat and a significant fraction of this heat is utilized by the rCEUS. As a result, significantly less heat has to be transferred to ambient and the fuel demand decreases. In this paper, three hydrogen storage options are compared: liquid hydrogen, subcooled liquid hydrogen and cryo-compressed hydrogen. Different para- and orthohydrogen compositions are evaluated. For typical FCS operating points, rejected FCS heat to ambient is reducible by 40–67%. FCS power demand is reducible by 14–31%. FCS rejected heat to ambient reduction is 4.5–8 times larger than that of conventional HXs. Calculations are based on hydrogen’s lower heating value.