Abstract
Keywords
Fuel cell bus, hydrogen consumption, urban bus driving cycles
Abstract
The replacement of conventional powertrains for vehicles with better fuel economy and stringent emission requirements, as vehicles equipped with fuel-cells, is a slow process. Its success will depend on environmental, regulatory and on world energy supply conditions, and on the efforts in research and development carried out by companies to develop this new technologies.
It is however a fact that, taking into account that prototypes based on that new technologies exist, the first steps are already done - programs demonstrating fuel-cell equipped vehicles performance and the employment of hydrogen as an alternative fuel to crude distillates -.
In this article it is presented a way to estimate hydrogen needs to supply an urban bus fleet for passengers transportation. By choosing bus line duty cycles of the city under study, it is possible to classify urban routes into groups as a previous step to evaluate the average fuel economy. It is also studied the effect of different bus fuel-cell powertrain technologies in energy consumption.