Designing, building, testing and racing a low-cost fuel cell range extender for a motorsport application

Imperial Racing Green is an undergraduate teaching project at Imperial College London. Undergraduate engineers have designed, built and raced hydrogen fuel cell hybrid vehicles in the Formula Zero and Formula Student race series. Imperial Racing Green has collaborated with its fuel cell partners to develop a 13 kW automotive polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) system. A team of undergraduate engineers were given a relatively modest budget and less than 8 months to design and assemble an operational high-power PEMFC system. The fuel cell system was designed to provide the average power required by the team's 2011 Formula Student entry. This paper presents the team's experience of developing and testing an automotive fuel cell system for a race application and plans for its future development and integration onto the vehicle.     

X-ray tomographic microscopy of fibre-reinforced materials

Aluminium composites containing Al₂O₃ fibres and precipitates of various intermetallic phases are investigated by high-resolution computerized microtomography. Individual fibres 15 μm in diameter and intermetallic phases forming a network with about 15 μm mesh size have been imaged. The capabilities of the method and its further development down 1 μm and less spatial resolution are discussed.     

Undercooling and demixing of copper-based alloys

Since the beginning of materials science research under microgravity conditions immiscible alloys have been an interesting subject. New possibilities to investigate such systems are offered by containerless processing techniques. Of particular interest is the ternary system Cu-Fe-Co, and its limiting binaries, Cu-Co and Cu-Fe. They all show a metastable miscibility gap in the regime of the undercooled melt. Within the ESA-MAP project “CoolCop”, different aspects of this alloy have been investigated; results obtained so far are reported here.     

Ventilation of small factory units

Ventilation rates have been measured using tracer gas techniques in a number of modern factory units with no mechanical ventilation. Wind direction remained fairly constant throughout the tests on individual units, enabling the variation of ventilation rate with wind speed to be determined. In the second phase of the work, measurements were made on a single building under a wide range of weather conditions. Although no correlation with wind direction was apparent, it was shown that the ventilation rate varied not only with wind speed, but also with the difference between the internal and external temperatures, i.e. the “stack effect”.