The demand for clean power source which can be used to run the various types of vehicles on the road is increasing on a daily basis due to the fact that high emissions released from internal combustion engine play a significant role in air pollution and climate change. Fuel cell devices, particularly Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) type, are strong candidates to replace the internal combustion engines in the transport industry. The PEMFC technology still has many challenges including high cost, low durability and hydrogen storage problems which limit the wide-world commercialization of this technology. In this paper, the fuel cell cost, durability and performances challenges which are associated with using of fuel cell technology for transport applications are detailed and reviewed. Recent developments that deal with the proposed challenges are reported. Furthermore, problems of hydrogen infrastructure and hydrogen storage in the fuel cell vehicle are discussed.

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Air pollution is becoming a very important issue for the transportation sector, particularly car emissions in urban areas, and there is much interest in evaluating the actual level of emissions. In this paper, a case study of a standard driving cycle in the urban area of Dublin city is presented. On-road, speed-time data was extracted by an on-board diagnostic tool, and saved into a data acquisition package. Firstly, the driving cycle was established for the urban area of the city; one car travelling different routes has been employed to implement this research and some representative results have been achieved. The second part of the project was to estimate the emissions from the same car using the driving cycle obtained and compare the results with those obtained by a gas analyzer attached to the car simultaneously in order to validate the methodology used in this paper.A representative driving cycle reflecting the real-world driving conditions is proposed and estimated vehicle emissions were compared with measured results. The method is easy to follow and the results are in a good fit to the estimated values.

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Buildings account for nearly 50% of the total energy consumption. The use of air-conditioning is one of the major influencers to the high energy consumption in buildings. To tackle this high energy consumption, buildings are required to be more energy efficient. This study aimed to investigate the retrofitting of existing residential building for energy efficiency by using the Overall Thermal Transfer Value (OTTV) as an assessment tool. Various retrofitting measures were involved, including varying the colour of the opaque wall with different solar absorptivity, the U-value and shading coefficient of the Glazing system, and the type and projection of the external shading. The results showed that applying the retrofitting measures individually (i.e., using light colour with low solar absorptivity, replacing the glazing system to have lower shading coefficient and U-value, and the installation of external shading systems with low shading coefficient) can decrease the OTTV by 26% to 33.4%. However, combining these measures managed to decrease the OTTV by up to 75.6% (i.e., the OTTV decreased from 82.87 W/m² to 20.19 W/m²). This can improve the building energy efficiency as it contributes to less cooling load for the air-conditioned buildings, while it provides a better indoor environment in non-air-conditioned buildings.

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