Analysis of Fuel Cell Vehicles Equipped with Compressed Hydrogen Storage Systems from a Road Accident Safety Perspective

The potential impact of real world accident scenarios on fuel cell vehicles equipped with a compressed hydrogen storage system is analyzed from a component point of view. Even though hydrogen compressed gas tanks can sustain very high loads, in this study a simplification is made. It is investigated to what extent different real world accident scenarios with conventional vehicles have caused deformation of the vehicle in the area where a hydrogen tank would have been integrated in a fuel cell vehicle. The study is based on accident data from the GIDAS (German In-Depth Accident Study) database. Deformation matrices for each passenger car in the database are defined over a deformation grid largely independent of vehicle type and shape. The matrices are combined to statistically analyze the occurrence of deformations in selected regions of a vehicle. The concept of cumulative frequencies is extended to two dimensional deformation matrices defined over a set of accident cases and a new algorithm is applied to calculate the cumulative frequency matrix which is discussed for the GIDAS sample. In addition, accidents which resulted in an intrusion up to an area where the compressed gas tank would likely be located are further investigated with respect to the situation in which they happened.