Advancing the sustainability of fuel cell systems

In Horizon Europe project MEAsureD, the development of high-temperature ion-pair fuel systems is assisted by supporting development activities on sustainability. These activities address a comprehensive environmental and economic assessment and include several approaches to improve the circularity of the PEM fuel cell system.

The work steps are:

• To establish a waste recycling protocol and investigate advanced, sustainable recycling pathways
• To conduct a life cycle assessment (LCA), utilizing primary and project specific data or new technology elements and manufacturing processes, efficiency gains in the use phase, and advantages in the end-of-live phase by the application of eco-design and through advanced recycling processes
• To investigate the potential of eco-design for related PEM FC systems

The activities included the carrying-out of a study on recycling techniques, comprehensive literature studies, and a baseline LCA assessment. AVL List has long-term experience not only with LCA and methodology, but can also rely on various tools like Umberto, openLCA or GREET, and in-house databases on materials, processes and products.

These steps are embedded in further development activities, which are being conducted in several R&D projects, where AVL List and partners are involved. These projects aim to improve and optimize sustainability and circularity of the hydrogen industry, including both fuel cell and electrolyzer technologies: The ‘ecodesign-wheel’, a methodology developed in Horizon project eGHOST, is extended in Horizon project GUESS-WHy with the aspect of ‘safety-and-security’. The methodology, based on a comprehensive sustainability assessment, (covering also social and cost aspects), is applied to develop SSbD (Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design) guidelines for overall 7 different FCH-technologies.

AVL, as partner in GUESS-WHy, applied the ecodesign wheel methodology also in MEAsureD to perform an ecodesign workshop dedicated on project specific HT-PEM HD fuel cell system with all consortium partners and further value chain actors.

The methodology supports the evaluation of the entire system and its complete value chain: from raw materials, through production, manufacturing and use phase, to the end-of-life phase. It helps identify measures that meaningfully advance product circularity while respecting intellectual property and company-specific confidentiality concerns at all times.