Nuvera Fuel Cells

By Darryl Pollica, PowerTap Platform Leader
Nuvera Fuel Cells

Many people may not be aware of Nuvera’s expertise in developing on-site hydrogen generation gas stations, called PowerTap^TM, which were developed in response to the specific need of finding a low-cost source of hydrogen fuel for our fuel cell forklift product.

The pace of our fuel cell development has been accelerating. The abundance of PEM fuel cell test stands and fuel cell product development activities inside Nuvera has created an ever increasing demand for pure hydrogen gas at our facility. Nuvera takes pride in using our own products for our internal use, and PowerTap is no different.

Once transitioned to our new Billerica facility, we have been supplying all of our fuel cell test stations and product development hydrogen gas needs via PowerTap, and are poised to be self sustaining this year!

Nuvera completed construction and testing of a high powered Forza Industrial Power System last night. The Phase 2 system outperformed its specified power rating of 150 kW by producing 168 kW of power.

Our CEO, Roberto Cordaro, was on hand to initiate the startup.

This was the first time this amount of power was produced at our new facility, and required the use of our largest on-site load bank, pictured above.

As many of you know, Nuvera, and our partner, East Penn Manufacturing, have developed The Total Power Solution for the North American Material Handling market. What many of you may not know, however, is what exactly the “material handling market” consists of. It certainly affects us every day, as we shop in grocery stores, purchase goods from retail centers and even order shoes online. Material handling is the industry of storing, lifting and transporting goods in and out of warehouses or moving parts and subassemblies within a manufacturing organization.

The preferred mode of transport in most of these warehouses, distribution centers and manufacturing operations is the forklift, currently battery powered when used indoors and IC engine powered when used outdoors. In many of these high traffic settings, time is literally money, so the more time the forklift operators have on the floor, moving goods, the more productive they can be, which means higher revenues for the warehouse.

This is where fuel cells come in. In place of lead acid batteries, forklifts are powered by fuel cell/battery hybrid packs, that are never changed out of the truck, and can be refueled with gaseous hydrogen in under two minutes. This means 15 minute trips to change batteries, which can happen once or more per shift, are eliminated, and valuable floor space is added to the profit center by eliminating the battery changing infrastructure. Fuel cells make material handling more productive.

If you want to learn more about the material handling industries view of fuel cells for forklift trucks, check out these two articles:

DC Velocity: Getting a Lift from Hydrogen

Material Handling Management: Lift Trucks get Cleaner and Greener

DOE Early Market Fact Sheet: Fuel Cells for Material Handling Equipment

Pininfarina, the famed Italian automotive designer, revealed its latest concept car at the Geneva Motor Show today. The revolutionary new car is called the Sintesi, and it features Nuvera’s new Quadrivium drive, which combines the high efficiency of fuel cells with the ability to operate on both conventional and biofuels.

When Pininfarina approached us with the ambitious challenge of making a high performance power train using ecologically benign technology, Nuvera engineers changed direction away from conventional technologies and embraced a radical new fuel cell concept. The result was four distributed wheel power modules, which allowed the car itself to be designed around the passengers, rather than the power train. The Sintesi brings together the cutting edge design approach of Pininfarina with our cutting edge technology, to provide a concept car as innovative in its look as it is in operation. What do you think of the new Sintesi?