March 2004

E-Mail This Article Printer-Friendly Version The conceptual design of the Vehicle Project fuel cell locomotive: the horizontally striped box at bottom right of engine compartment represents the hydride storage system. The six square boxes immediately above and two at left end below are the PEM fuel cell modules.

DENVER, CO - Engineering design work will get underway in a little more than two months for the world's first megawatt-class fuel cell locomotive, a project launched here last year by an international consortium (H&FCL Sept. 03). If all goes according to plan, the actual conversion to fuel cell power of the existing 100-ton plus diesel electric "road-switcher" GP-10 locomotive won't get underway for another couple of years or so, Arnold Miller, president of Vehicles Projects LLC, Denver, the consortium's lead company, told H&FCL. The 5-year program is funded and administered by the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command's National Automotive Center, Warren, MI.

In the first year of the five-year development and demonstration program, the consortium has completed a major deliverable, a conceptual design of the 109 metric ton, 1.2 MW fuel cell locomotive's onboard fuel storage, offboard hydrogen generation plant, refueling system, fuel cell power plant, and locomotive layout, Vehicle Projects said in a release. Also completed is the initial feasibility study as well as an economic study, a project completed by the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, of the U.S. Department of Transportation, Cambridge, MA, Miller said.

First year funding totaled about $1 million, according to Miller, and second year funds of another $1 million are already assured. Miller estimates the grand total for the entire five-year project will come to about $15 million.

Ammonia To Be Investigated as Hydrogen Source

Essentially, the consortium is taking a two-pronged approach to the fuel storage and fuel production issue: on-board hydride storage and off-board hydrogen generation from ammonia. If generating hydrogen from ammonia, a fertilizer - something that has been advocated and/or tried repeatedly in past decades - proves economical and efficient, an onboard ammonia-based fueling system may evolve.

The target is to store about 250 kg of hydrogen, enough to operate the locomotive for a couple of days, in a massive 25 metric ton metal hydride system at roughly 1% by weight storage capacity. The hydride system will be developed by HERA Hydrogen Storage Systems, Inc., Longueuil, Quebec, Canada, and Ringwood, NJ.

Miller says those 250 kg can be absorbed by the hydride in about 30 minutes, about the same or maybe a little longer than it takes to refuel a comparable diesel electric locomotive. The trick is removing the heat that is generated when a hydride is charged with hydrogen:

The designers have developed a two tank off-board heat sink system - one filled with ambient-temperature water, the other empty - which removes the heat at a thermal rate of 2

MW: The system circulates water through the onboard hydride bed removing the heat and pumping it at about 20 deg. C higher temperature into the empty tank where it cools naturally over eight hours or so.

The off-board ammonia dissociation system, to be developed by MesoFuel, Inc., Albuquerque, NM is regarded as promising. Ammonia is a non-carbon-based renewable commodity , commonly used as fertilizer and typically transported by rail tank car. Ammonia can be catalytically dissociated into a gas mixture of 75% hydrogen and 25% nitrogen, a gas that accounts for about 80% of the earth's atmosphere. Hydrogen would be captured and stored under relatively low pressure - 160 bar - in the Vehicle Projects concept, if viability can be established.

AeroVironment Leads Design, Integration

AeroVironment, Monrovia, CA will leaded the detailed design and integration of the power plant at Hill Air Force Base in northern Utah, a military facility that includes the defense rail equipment center with a complete railroad rebuilding shop, according to Miller.

The consortium looked at other fuels such as LNG, JP-8 (a military fuel), methanol and others. It also looked at other hydrogen storage systems such as state of-the-art compressed 5000 psi hydrogen tanks but found that a tank large enough to carry fuel for 30-40 hours of operation would take up a volume of about 18,000 liters, clearly impossible given the fact that the locomotive's engine compartment is only 25,000 liters.

The proposed 1.2 MW fuel cell plant consists of eight identical 150 kW stand-alone modules powered by Forza^(TM) PEM stacks from Nuvera Fuel Cells, Inc., Cambridge, MA and Milan, Italy. The consortium says the Nuvera stacks were chosen because of the ruggedness and compactness of their metal bipolar plates and the simplicity of the proprietary direct-water injection cooling and membrane humidification system. Both HERA and Nuvera were partners in another Vehicle Projects effort, development of a 23-metric ton 150 kW fuel cell-battery hybrid mine loader supported by the U.S. Energy Department and Natural Resources Canada.

Other project participants who contributed to the locomotive's conceptual design include Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Company, Ft. Worth; Union Pacific Railroad, Omaha, NE; Defense NTG & Rail Equipment Center, Hill Air Force Base, UT; Crane Division, Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane, IN; New York City Transit, New York City; Railway Technical Research Institute, Tokyo, Japan; Regional Transportation District Denver, Denver; Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio; Transportation Technology Center, Inc (TTCI), Pueblo, CO; US Army CERDEC, Army Power Division, and the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, Research Special Program Administration, US Department of Transportation, Cambridge, MA

Miller is particularly enthusiastic about the participation of the various railroad entities in the United States and in Japan.

"We are trying to develop a technology now that we can expand later to other applications," he says. The Japanese participation in particular - world leaders in high-speed rail systems - is of particular interest because of the institute's interest and expertise in passenger rail. Contact: Arnold Miller, Vehicle Projects, phone 303/986-0530; arnold.miller@vehicleprojects.com.