Glasgow-based energy systems research company PNDC has taken delivery of HVS’s first prototype of a hydrogen-powered medium-duty commercial vehicle.
This initiative is part of a £15 million grant-funded project from the UK government’s Advanced Propulsion Centre (APC), with PNDC set to conduct performance testing on the chosen fuel cell.
As a consortium partner in the project, PNDC will play a crucial role in supporting the development of a vehicle control system. Additionally, they will undertake system validation using their Power Hardware in the Loop (PHiL) capability to expedite the development and testing of the vehicle powertrain.
The HVS hydrogen truck will be used as a static testbed by PNDC to assess the electrical and thermal performance of the onboard hydrogen fuel cell. This evaluation will include an examination of degradation under realistic driving scenarios, based on the design of larger Heavy Goods Vehicles (HGV).
”We are proud to be a partner in the HVS led consortium to develop the UK’s first hydrogen fuel cell HGV. As an industry-facing innovation centre, we support ambitious companies such as HVS to accelerate technology development and decrease time to market. Our contribution to the project helps achieve that by leveraging the unique engineering expertise and open access facility at PNDC to support HVS’ engineering programme through modelling, testing and validating the performance of the vehicle power system,” noted Dan Cutting, Business Development Manager at PNDC.
Steve Clayson,Chief Product Officer HVS said, ”HVS are proud to be working with PNDC and Strathclyde University on this project. We are thankful to the Advanced Propulsion Centre for facilitating this collaboration through the APC20 grant fund. This enables industry and academia to work together to deliver innovations to the market. Hydrogen power presents significant challenges, which we and PNDC will tackle ‘head on’ to bring our hydrogen powered trucks to market in the coming years.”
