Hydrogen with hydropower from the Ilm river
The BMBF-funded research project h2well-compact, starting June 1st 2021, will test decentralized hydrogen production and application in mobility.
Producing green hydrogen with local renewable energy and supplying it to a service station for fuel cell vehicles - investigating such a hydrogen supply system is the focus of the research work in h2well-compact. The project is funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) within the framework of the WIR! alliance h2-well Hydrogen Source and Value Creation Region Main-Elbe-LINK. The Chair of Energy Systems at Bauhaus University Weimar heads the work in the project, which is implemented in Apolda. The district town of the Weimarer Land shall serve as a model for locations with similar conditions for decentralized hydrogen production on a small scale.
Hydrogen production under the specific conditions of small renewable energy plants
In h2well-compact one of the technological goals is to adapt a PEM pressure electrolyzer, which uses a proton exchange membrane (PEM) to split water into hydrogen and oxygen by means of electricity, to the specific conditions of small renewable energy plants. For this purpose, the Chair of Energy Systems develops different approaches for dimensioning electrolysis plants in interaction with renewable, fluctuating energy and with regards to different application scenarios. The goal is to create a modeling approach that considers different operating regimes of the system components for decentralized hydrogen production and that can be transferred to other plants.
Mobile storage and compression for flexible hydrogen delivery and a newly developed H2 filling station prototype
Project partners seek to deliver the hydrogen generated at the plant on the Ilm-river by using an innovative storage and compression solution, to be designed in the project. An on-board compressor shall ensure hydrogen can be compressed to the pressure level required by the customer. The mobile solution will be tested, inter alia, in conjunction with a new prototype of hydrogen filling station, developed in h2well-compact. Thanks to an H2 storage cascade, fuel cell vehicles will be able to refuel at the hydrogen station without an upstream compressor.
The Chair of Energy Systems is responsible for the coordination of the project, in which the WIR! alliance partners AVX/Kumatec Hydrogen GmbH & Co. KG, Energieversorgung Apolda GmbH, Fraunhofer IKTS Hermsdorf, Höschel & Baumann Elektro GmbH, Imaginata e.V., IMG Electronic & Power Systems GmbH, MAXIMATOR GmbH and Rießner-Gase GmbH are involved.