Prof.  Xin  Gao
Institute for Internal Combustion Engines and Fuel Cells (ivb), Technische Universität Braunschweig,  Germany

Title: Hydrogen PEM fuel cells for aviation, and their reliability considerations

Abstract:

Electromobility and especially airmobility is increasing its share among all transportation sectors. Along the process, hydrogen-electric propulsion relying on polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cells as a most promising and key disruptive solution, is gradually stretching its popularity among aircraft belonged to more segments. However, in the trend, aviation still put stringent requirements on the 1) efficiency, 2) specific power, 3) specific energy, and 4) reliability, of these fuel cell systems. Among them, reliability affects the rest three key indexes deeply and significantly. Screening open literatures, there is still a big gap between the state of the art (SoA) reliability and the aviation requirements. Therefore, its enhancement is seen urgent. In general, reliability of a system can be strengthened either through system robust design or via operation strategy optimization. This talk will firstly give a review on our efforts in the past 4 years working on the abovementioned 4 indexes, as well as an overview of the research and industrial communities. Then our short-term and media-term solutions and proposals on tackling with the reliability challenges will be the rest part of this talk.

Biography:

Mr. Xin Gao as a specialist has been leading a junior research group (inside the German excellence cluster SE2A) and now a working group (inside the Horizon Europe EFACA), specifically on hydrogen PEM fuel cells for aviation, since early 2019, at Technical University of Braunschweig (TuBs), Germany. Prior to joining TuBs, Mr. Gao was a postdoctoral researcher at Aalborg Univerisity (AAU), Denmark (2014-2018), a project specialist of China’s Tsinghua University (2015), and has briefly visited Iowa State University (2016). He received his M.Sc. degree from Tongji University (Shanghai, China) in 2009 and Ph.D. degree at AAU in 2014.
Since 2007, Mr. Gao has been working in research areas of hydrogen fuel cells. His research interests and experiences are broad, covering from material preparation, characterization to full industrial systems design and operation, including simulations with multi-physics on multi-scales. So far, Mr. Gao has supervised 2 full PhD researchers and about 40 student thesis work at TuBs. He has more than 20 peer-reviewed journal publications (citations 696, h-index 11, i10-index 11), and is currently a guest editor of Energies.