Since 1992, Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) has been working on the development of fuel cell system technology. TMC is designing principal components in-house, including fuel cell stacks, high-pressure hydrogen storage tank systems, and hybrid systems. TMC developed the '02 model TOYOTA FCHV, the world-first market-ready fuel cell vehicle, and started limited lease of the vehicles in 2002. In 2005, TMC developed a new model of TOYOTA FCHV which obtained vehicle type certification in Japan, and is currently available for leasing.TMC has improved the cruising range and cold start/drive capability of the TOYOTA FCHV, and conducted public road tests to evaluate the performance. The improved TOYOTA FCHV successfully traveled from Osaka to Tokyo (approximately 560km, 350 miles) on a single fueling of hydrogen. In addition, the cold weather tests carried out in Hokkaido and North America have verified its starting/driving capability at subfreezing temperatures including -37°C.Although many obstacles remain towards commercialization of fuel cell vehicles, TMC is committed to overcome the obstacles. This paper describes TMC's approaches toward solving the challenges of cruising range and cold start/drive capability.
To reduce the cost during purge for Fuel Cell Vehicles (FCVs), it is necessary to maintain water content inside FCV appropriately and to save the purge time by restraining the increase of water content. Considering the mount-ability onto vehicles, low and high two-frequency superimposed impedance measurement was adopted to clarify the water behavior. It was verified that oxygen diffusion resistance was influenced by oxygen transport both inside inomer and voids. R void which is a parameter of water content was calculated, and correlation between them and the approximate equation became clear. Moreover, we suggested a feedback system of water content to FCV operation and the controlling method.
This paper discusses a digital control method for efficiency improvement of switching power circuit at light load by using C2000 Series DSP (Texas Instruments Inc.). In this work, we alter the module in DSP to adjust the link voltage between a bridgeless PFC AC/DC converter and a phase shift full bridge DC/DC converter, as well as to control the PWM frequency of power circuit in order to improve the power efficiency in a suitable way. Our experiments result show that the efficiency of the power circuit at half or light load improves by adjusting the link voltage and/or PWM frequency
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