Bryan and his international collaborators at the University of Toronto win the prestigious Hydrogen Student Design Contest!

Bryan and his international collaborators based at the University of Toronto (UofT) win the prestigious Hydrogen Student Design Contest. The contest is an annual, international design competition hosted by the Hydrogen Education Foundation.

Over a 4 month period, teams of 3 to 12 work to design a 40 page engineering report detailing the design of a hydrogen refueling station including a technical design, an economic, a safety, an environmental, and a regulatory analysis. In addition, teams must produce a 1 page pamphlet and a 3 minute video of their design.

This year’s competition theme was “Designing a Power-to-Gas System.” The challenge was to develop a design for a system that uses electricity to produce hydrogen for cross market uses, including energy storage, ancillary services, and transportation fuel. The teams chose a site in their area, engaged their local electric and gas utility, coordinated with regulatory bodies and safety experts, and created educational materials.

Bryan’s team named themselves, Motion+ and their winning design is titled, “Amphibious Yacht and Fueling Station.” Bryan’s team redesigned an amphibious luxury yacht to run on hydrogen gas using the Toyota Mirai proton exchange membrane fuel cell and a custom designed electric outboard. Their boat was named the Hydronautic+. To fuel the yacht, a dockside refueling station was designed to use excess renewable energy from the Ontario, Canada electricity grid to power a polymer electrolyte membrane electrolyzer to produce hydrogen gas. The fueling station was named the fHuel+ station.

Bryan and his team presented their design at the Department of Energy’s Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Program 2018 Annual Merit Review and Peer Evaluation Meeting in Washington D.C. held from June 13th to 15th.