Major technical progress with demonstrator SMARTHyES

An autonomous system outside the laboratory environment: the SYDNEY prototype developed by the CEA in 2014-2015 operated in Grenoble in a laboratory environment managing in particular all fluid flows (deionized water, purified compressed air, laboratory hydrogen, synthetic CH4) and electricity. The demonstrator SMARTHYES is, on the contrary, perfectly autonomous: it is coupled to the electrical network and only needs a supply of industrial water and natural gas network.

The hydrogen produced wasn't valorised, in the laboratory version. It is now recovered and compressed to be stored in canisters. This system was defined jointly by CEA-Liten and Sylfen and designed and realized by AUTOCLAVE-MAXITECH. Hydrogen is stored as a gas at 200 bar, and is then reused by the system when operating in fuel cell mode.

Finally, the demonstrator integrates a Li-ion battery system of 10kWh, developed and delivered by the Grenoble start-up ENERSTONE, which has included an innovation in terms of BMS (battery management system) to manage the balancing between cells.

This demonstrator was also made possible with the help from DEMS (Design), AEI (integration) and EMISYS (Engineering and Project management).

Flexible and automated operation: three power levels are achievable in each of the three operating modes of the system (hydrogen production, hydrogen fuel cell, natural gas fuel cell), i.e. 9 operating points, plus a standby mode and a security mode.

CEA-Liten has developed and coded the strategies allowing the system to automatically switch from one of these points to any other, without any manual intervention, which implies a dynamic control of the flow, pressure and current instructions. Each transition, at this stage of development, lasts a few minutes (the longest being 10 min, and 6 min in average). These durations will be substantially reduced in the future.

This leads to the conclusion that SOFC/SOEC technology is indeed a flexible technology, capable of adjusting its power according to customer needs. And there is no need for an expert to manually control the system!