Assembly and Testing of a Hydrogen Fuel Cell System to Power an Airship

An airship, or dirigible balloon, is an aircraft that gains its lift from a gas less dense than air, like helium. For traction, airships have two or more propellers normally attached to a gondola that is suspended under the balloon. At present, they are used for hovering long times without the need for a high speed, like for aerial observation, advertising, or as camera platforms. In our laboratory, the airship is being used as a platform for testing hydrogen fuel cell systems for aerial applications. The airship used in this communication is a 3 m3 polyurethane's inflatable zeppelin, with radio control, and three electrical propellers (Fig. 1a). A hydrogen fuel cell system has been developed and integrated with the gondola for powering the propellers and electronics. The fuel cell is a 15 W PEMFC stack prototype able to work fully under passive feeding conditions (Fig. 1b). In addition, three supercapacitors have been implemented, that are recharged by the fuel cell, for eventual larger power demands up to 40 W. Hydrogen is stored in two metal hydride canisters with 2g capacity to provide 30 W h energy enough for a few hours autonomy. In addition, for fuel cell parameters monitoring, different sensors have been implemented that provide voltages of the individual cells, current, and temperatures. The sensors are connected to Arduino board, and measurements are continuously monitored by a Labview software with wifi. Boost dc-dc conversion provides 7V voltage power to feed the motors. The stack prototype allows for different testing configurations, using cells in series and parallel connection to change power characteristics with different voltage and current. Results of the testing are provided in this communication. Acknowledgement: The work is partially financed by the ELHYPORT project (PID2019−110896RB-I00), Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Figure 1