WATERLOO — Researchers at the University of Waterloo have designed a new hydrogen fuel cell for cars they say could make the technology cheap enough to compete with the internal combustion engine.

The new fuel cells have a lifespan up to 10 times longer than current fuel cell technology, an improvement that could make them more competitive if mass-produced and could help usher in a new wave of emissions-free vehicles.

Xianguo Li, director of the Fuel Cell and Green Energy Lab at Waterloo, said current fuel cell technology suffers due to the variability of the electrical load as cars move from stop-and-go traffic to high-speed highway driving, and other driving conditions in between.

"What happens is the lifetime is reduced substantially if you have this variability," he said.

The current lifespan of a hydrogen fuel cell is about 3,000 hours, but Li said the UW research team has increased that to nearly 30,000 hours.

Hydrogen is stored in tanks inside the vehicle, and when combined with oxygen from outside the vehicle, a chemical reaction occurs that generates electricity.

Vehicles can be fuelled in much the same way as a traditional gas vehicle — it takes about five minutes to fill the hydrogen tank — and the driving range is virtually the same. The only emission is water.

To improve the lifespan, Li and his team took the traditional fuel cell unit and divided it into three smaller units.

The physical size and energy output remains unchanged, but three units provide more control over the variable electrical load requirements.

Slower urban driving can be handled by the on-board battery, allowing the fuel cells to be completely shut off.

And when the battery runs low or a higher speed is required, one of the fuel cells can be activated to run the car as well as charge the battery.

The car can also cycle through the three cells, giving some a rest while others are in operation.

"That way they are either on or off — zero or 100 per cent — so the cell is working under its best design conditions, and the lifetime is longer," Li said.

The research team's results, published in the journal Applied Energy, indicate the durability of the on-board fuel cells can be increased over current cells by 11.8, 4.8 and 6.9 times, respectively, for urban, highway and a combined urban-highway driving cycle.

The redesign also gives drivers options should one of the cells fail while on the road.

"If one cell has a problem, you still have two working (cells)," he said, allowing the driver to get the vehicle home or to a repair shop safely. "In the older design, if it had a problem, the whole system didn't work."

Li collaborated with lead researcher Hongtao Zhang, Waterloo mathematics professor Xinzhi Liu, and Jinyue Yan, an energy expert and professor in Sweden.

The Toyota Mirai sedan is one of the first mass production hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles on the market, but it starts at about $60,000. Only about 5,000 have been sold since the vehicle launched in 2014.

The key to making the technology economically practical to a wider range of consumers is to achieve wide-scale production. Li estimates it can be achieved if half a million vehicles are built annually using the technology.

That may sound like a lot, he noted, but it could be achieved in a country like China, where hydrogen fuel cells are more widely accepted and the market saw 28 million cars sold in 2018.

"Fuel cells are very popular, or at least the concept is, over there," Li said.

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